The Nightingale Effect
by Animelover007
Summary: Stranded in the neighboring forest, Takuma awakens to finds himself in the care of a young woman who's brash tongue and un-trusting eyes leave him bewildered while he recovers from his wounds. Her name is Izanami Kusoichi and unknown to him, she has a deeper connection to him than he thinks. Deviates from the original storyline a bit.
1. 1: Prolouge

In the light of the new day smoke clouded the sky, obscuring the sun and covering everything upon the ground in a mist-colored hue. A mountain of rock and rubble sat in place of where a large estate had once stood like a tall, dark shadow. Smoke rose from various crevices and cracks, joining the gray clouds above and masking the green of the forest surrounding the destroyed mansion. In what might have been a courtyard laid a lone figure, a man, his clothes torn and bloodied from a previous battle. He was unusual in the sense that there was no other like him: he was paler than any human, and, unlike his vampire brethren, he often stayed up late into the day, basking in the warm sunlight and almost always wore an equally bright smile on his face.

Yet here he lay, dying, amid the rubble and fresh decay and dust of his enemy—his Grandfather. Gone was his usual bright smile in favor of one of unconsciousness—a restful expression he now wore, like a great burden had been lifted from his shoulders. Unnoticed to him, another person—a woman—had entered the grounds, their steps echoing off the walls that had somehow stood against the fight. Without hesitation she stepped towards the young man, stopping a few inches from his body before crouching down beside him.

Reaching one hand over him she placed a light hand on his back, covering the area where his heart would be and carefully measuring the beats. With her other hand she reached towards his face, small breaths of air rolling over her fingers as she placed her hand under his nose. Sighing to herself—either out of relief or resignation—she slapped her hands against her knees and stood, her shadow covering him like a blanket. She looked back behind herself, towards the mountainside that seemed perpetually covered in fog like a thick veil. She sighed to herself once more, slightly glaring down at the unconscious young man before a voice startled her, causing her to turn back towards the way she had come.

"He's dying you know," they said, moving around the stone wall that had obscured them from view. The woman narrowed her eyes in slight recognition before turning her sights back to the man in question.

"So then what do you suggest I do?" the woman asked them, causing their mouth to turn up at the corners in a cunning smile.

"Let's make an arrangement, shall we?"


	2. 2: Chapter 1

Sunlight had never been an issue for him. He was a rare type of vampire in that way. Although now, in the aftermath of battle, the sunlight he would normal revel in felt like pins and needles to his aching eyes as it attempted to pierce his eyelids. Thankfully a shadow fell upon his pain struck eyes, and masked the rays of the sun from him. He felt relief in this minor comfort before his mind became alert to the presence of a person inside this room he had been brought to, but then that struck the question: where was he? Surely he was not in the house he had grown up in. No, he had brought it down brick by brick when he set out to bring an end to the Ichijou line. A hand swept his forehead, sweeping away the hair that fell there, and rested against his head, like a mother feeling for a fever on her sick child.

This action felt foreign to him, so it was of no surprise when his own hand reached up and grabbed the person's wrist, a woman's by the slim feel of it beneath his palm. Against his fingertips he felt the slow steady pulse of her heart shake once in subtle shock before slowing to a relaxed beat.

"Looks like you're recovering alright if you've got a grip like that," the woman said, her voice both rough and soft in his ears, yet he couldn't bear to open his eyes and look upon his would-be savior. Little known to him he didn't have to, for she reached with the fingers of her free hand to his eyes and gently pried one open, exposing his pupil to the dim lighting of a wood paneled room, and young woman, no older then he was, standing at his bedside. "Ahh~ I was wrong. Looks like you have green eyes," she remarked releasing his eyelid and pulling her hand free of his loosening grip.

"Who are you?" the young vampire asked, moving his raised hand to his face to rub tiredly at his eyes, working them open more naturally then her rash action had. He brought his hand down next to hesitantly touch his sore throat. Whether it was like this because of misuse for however long he had been unconscious, or because of his need for blood, he wasn't quite sure of yet. He looked up at the woman next to him, and remarked to himself about what he saw. A young woman of fair skin and a taller than average, gangly frame, yet she was no shorter than him by an inch or so. Shoulder length, light brown hair framed an oval face, and blue-green eyes like that of a glass marble sat perched above a small nose and pale, thin lips. For sure she wasn't a beauty like his former classmate Ruka, or could even be considered gorgeous by anyone's standards, but she had the type of look to her that—to him—made her seem sweet and innocent. A slightly rounded face, a gentle curve to her smile, and a somewhat feminine figure. At least to him her appearance was too sweet and kind for the harshness of her personality which matched her outward appearance like polka dots and stripes.

"Name's Izanami Kusoichi, but feel free to call me Iz. Now who the hell are you, Mr. Prince?" Izanami asked, folding her arms across an ample chest, looking down at him with a look of mixed emotion, one he could not pinpoint.

"Ah, my name is Takuma Ichijou. A pleasure to meet you." As a gentleman, he could not be any means forget his manners in the presence of a lady, no matter how bad mannered the young lady was. He started to sit up only to fall back against the headboard when a sharp pain went through his upper body, more specifically his chest. He pressed his hand against his chest in a feeble attempt to relieve the pain, only to close his eyes tightly and ball the sheet covering him in his fist, waiting for the pain to subside, and dreading when it didn't.

Izanami reached down to grab the hand that was held tightly to an area over his heart, moving it away despite his protest, and began to unbutton his foreign shirt, revealing a smattering of bandages covering his upper torso. The area over his heart had begun to seep red, staining the once white bandage with blood and perspiration.

"So, Mr. Takuma Ichijou, how'd you get an injury like that and manage to survive?" Izanami asked, studying him with an intensity like that of a scientist or a doctor analyzing their subject, eyeing every twitch and muscle movement Takuma showed as he focused on answering her questions.

"I-I don't remember," he answered, swallowing despite the dryness of his throat. Izanami sat down on the edge of the bed, reaching over him to a glass of water set on a bed side table.

"It's too bad you can't remember," she dryly commented, her eyes and voice revealing to him that she didn't believe a word he said. Of course he couldn't blame her, nor could he tell her the real reason for his injury. He was most likely branded a liar, yet he couldn't very well have her think him insane. "You've been unconscious for four days. Depending on the nature of your injury, I would have guessed you'd be out for longer," she continued, reaching up a hand to graze the bandage, with her nails.

"Ever since I was a child I've been a quick healer," Takuma answered, watching Izanami as carefully as she was watching him.

"Even so, you're body isn't up to par with your mind. I suggest, Mr. Takuma Ichijou, that you let your body rest for the next few days." While she was talking her fingers had let slip the knot tying together his bandages, loosening and unraveling them from his torso. Takuma feared that she would see a wound farther along in the healing process then it should be, and began to protest against it, only to have his efforts refuted. He waited nervously, absentmindedly clutching the blanket out of fear that she would ask him what he was. It was an action she misinterpreted as slight pain when the bandage stuck to his flesh several times because of the amount of dried blood over his wound. And when she removed the last of the bandage from his body, Takuma stared in shock at the bloody gash and the crude placement of black stitches near his solar plexus.

"Still think you're all right, Mr. Takuma Ichijou?" Izanami asked him, referencing his earlier argument when she was removing the bandage.

"I…I didn't think it was this bad…" he said at a loss for words. Takuma could tell that it was healing despite its vulgar appearance, the wound closing up very slowly despite his rapid healing ability. Evidence that the blow dealt to him was more deadly than he remembered.

_The severity of the injury must have hindered the healing process. Perhaps that is why my throat is burning_, he thought. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Izanami open a drawer in the night stand and withdraw from it a roll of gauze. Picking at the edge, she placed the end on his left side and unrolled it across his chest, giving him simple commands, such as: pick up your arms, as she wrapped his body in the bandage. When the wound was once again covered, she tied off the end in a knot and replaced the gauze in the drawer.

"Take it easy for the next few days, Mr. Takuma Ichijou. However bad the outside may look, it's the inside that sustains the worst damage," she said, standing up from his bedside, "Best let your body rest and recover until that wound turns into a scar, don't you agree?" She raised her hand, her index finger pressed against his forehead, willing him to lie back down on the bed. "Sleep well, Mr. Takuma Ichijou." With this simple farewell, she turned away from the man lying in her bed, a lazy wave thrown carelessly over her shoulder. When she reached the open bedroom door, Takuma stopped her with a single word, causing her to pause in the doorway, but not turn around.

"Can you tell me where I am?" he asked her, eyebrows furrowed, green eyes filled with curiosity as to who this young woman was and how she had come to find him.

She inclined her head towards him; her eyes seemed to be looking at him out of their corners, yet her short bangs hid that fact from him. The woman gave him a smile, showing her upper teeth before hiding them completely when she frowned once again. It was like she had a heard a joke that had lost its humorous intent after a brief moment. "Middle of nowhere, centered in the hills of a mountain range," she answered, leaving him to question both her riddle and her sanity. The only other clue that he and Izanami were still close to the broken home was that they must have been within walking distance since her house seemed to be situated in the mountains. While the question of where he was took space within his mind, one other question plagued his subconscious:

How had he survived when he was supposed to die?

* * *

He couldn't go back to sleep. Not after he had just woken up after being unconscious for several days. That said he couldn't lie in bed any longer than a few hours just staring up at the ceiling and wondering what had happened to his friends or what Kaname had done to the Council.

Although her request had been more of a demand, he decided to find her and tell her his thanks for healing him to the best of her abilities before leaving. However, when he entered what he assumed to be her kitchen, straight down the hall from the bedroom he was staying in, both her stance and her tone came off glacial cold as soon as he stepped inside.

"Didn't I tell you to lie down for a few days and take it easy?" Izanami asked him, taking care to not grace him with her full attention as she focused on the task at hand: chopping vegetables on a cutting board and throwing them carelessly into a metal pot on a gas stove.

He paused a few feet away from her, his former plan escaping him in the presence of someone colder than ice itself.

"Yes…but I'm feeling much better than before. Although appearances say otherwise," he replied, his reassuring smile dropping a few degrees at the corners when she turned a fearsome glare on him, eyes as soulless as the marbles they represented.

"If you're feeling better, then maybe you should hit the bricks," she told him coldly, turning back to her cooking process.

It was something that he wanted, sure, but he didn't want to part ways like this, with her in this foul mood that seemed to be ever present within her.

"Well…I mean—" Takuma started to say only to be cut off mid-sentence when she turned on him and roughly pushed him against the far wall. His body slid down the wood paneling until he sat upon the floor, head falling back to rest against the wall as the pain in his chest flared up again in accordance to his breathing until he felt the sole of her shoe press against his solar plexus, igniting something akin to a bonfire within his body. As the pain dulled down to a low burning ember, Takuma opened his eyes from the squinted slits they had become to see Izanami staring down at him with something he could only assume was a mixture of pity and distance.

"I'm not doing this because I get off seeing you in pain, Mr. Prince. I'm doing this to prove that you are not "better". For all we know you could have internal bleeding and me pressing on your injury might be making it worse. And don't think me cruel, I just don't want to send you off on your merry way only to find your obituary in tomorrow's circulars. Got it?" she said, removing her foot and replacing it with her hand in front of his face. He hesitated before placing his right hand in hers, gripping it tightly as she pulled him up to his feet, stumbling a bit due to the sudden force. "If you're not going to rest, then either take a seat or explore my humble abode. Just make sure you take it easy." She went back to her cooking then, throwing something that looked vaguely like a radish into the odd mixture. Takuma watched her warily for a moment, weighing his given options against each other. Like hours earlier, she was in no positive mood for anything close to conversation, and he decided it best to leave her alone for the time being. So he left her, turning back to the other doorway that looked to be the entrance to the sitting room, yet before he left her alone completely, she gave a warning to the blonde.

"Don't open the door at the end of the hallway."

It was an odd sentence, even for her, yet it compelled him to ask her the consequences if he should disobey this simple command. Not that he would, but it was simple curiosity.

She looked back at him, a menacing smirk in place of her somewhat usual glare. "Because if you do, I'll have to kill you."

Not to say that her threats weren't convincing, if anything he believed that she did indeed have the skill set to challenge him if the dead rabbit on her kitchen table was any indication of how deadly she was. More so it was the belief that someone wouldn't go through the trouble of nursing another back to health only to kill them off with their bare hands. And if she was like any other human, then she would be the same.

Izanami continued to smile menacingly at the blond man she had found lying injured in the dirt and rubble of a mansion long dead—if not physically then spiritually. He in turn looked at her, not so much as an ounce of fear or indifference towards her vague threat. Instead in place was a small, amused smile, like he didn't believe a word she said.

_Tricky, but I know I intimidate him to some level,_ Izanami thought, her eyes softening slightly enough to look less emotionless, and her wide smirk turning in to a small, slightly amused smile.

"Just kidding," she said, leaning her left hip against the counter upon which she cut her vegetables. "But seriously, don't go inside. I don't think I'd be able to face you again if I did." She turned back to her cooking, taking her knife in hand while the blond boy behind her held back a shiver, wondering what it was behind the door at the end of the hall that caused her to grow more callous, if that were possible.

He left her then, turning his back on the woman and her dead rabbit in favor of exploring her home since it would likely be a few weeks at most before she allowed him to leave the perimeter of her sight.

* * *

Takuma, as a member of the highest nobility of vampire, was used to high class human meals when such occasion arose. Not to say he was a stranger to the common place meals when the situation called for it. Not to mention the candies and pocky that Senri and Rima carried with them. That said he had never eaten something quite like Rabbit Stew. At least, that's what he assumed it to be from the disappearance of the dead rabbit from her kitchen table.

And so it continued. With the exception of breakfast, the latter two meals of the next two days was this strange concoction of vegetables and rabbit meat that Izanami forced Takuma to eat. On the night of the second day after Takuma had risen from his almost comatose slumber, he made the mistake of questioning Izanami's readymade meal set before him, to which she replied rather harshly:

"They're called 'left over's'. And if you think my cooking is not good enough to be eaten three days in a row, then I dare you to try and make _me_ something healthy and nutritious that will send me on my merry way back to whatever third-rate fantasy romance novel you jumped out of."

After which he didn't question her about her food anymore. But made it a habit to thank her profusely after they had eaten and opt for any and all chores she needed down inside the house. It wasn't that he was ungrateful for her meals, her hospitality, or her first-aid. No. It was simply that there came a limit to how often a person ate the same meal daily. So it was that on the third night of his recovery that he was rewarded a break from the usual stew.

Throughout the three days he had been there he had gathered bits of information about his would-be hostess. Small things like her age—of which she was eighteen—and how long she had been living by herself—three years to the day of two months and five days ago as she put it. How she was a survivalist of sorts and a hunter—this made known by the several rabbits and few ducks she had brought back from her ventures out into the surrounding forest, and stored behind the mysterious door at the end of the hall. While he had tried to gather more information about her and their location, she was quick to announce Quid Pro Quo and extract the same amount of information from him. While to her it seemed like an even trade of information from the questions asked, to him it seemed like she was gathering more than she ought to.

So it was on this third night, when the reprieve from Rabbit Stew was a blessing in the form of what looked to be a roasted duck and potatoes, that she asked her top three "Topics of Interest" as she liked to call them.

"So, what's the topic tonight? Family? Hobbies? Your odd sleeping patterns?" she asked him, causing him to flinch in slight surprise and glance up at her, eyes full of worry and slight displeasure.

"Well…family sounds like a nice topic," he said his discomfort evident in his voice. While he had been hoping that Izanami might pass off his late mornings and nights as a sign of recuperation, it was obvious that this wasn't the case in Izanami's cold, calculating eyes.

She looked at him tiredly, like she had been through this a thousand times before, and set down her knife and fork, pushing away her half-empty plate to evaluate his body language thoroughly, folding her arms on the table top while she blankly stared him down. After a few minutes of uncomfortable silence had gone by, she sighed, conceding to his choice of conversation silently while she went back to her meal. "Alright, Mr. Prince, you're topic wins. I wanted to ask you a question anyway," she consented, sticking a forkful of meat into her mouth. Throughout his stay there, he had yet to shake the nickname she had so cleverly given him, and yet in his mind, he knew that she would never stop.

"Oh. Alright. What is it you wanted to ask me?" he asked in confusion.

"What's your family like?" she asked him suddenly, turning his confused expression into one of surprise.

"What do you mean?" Takuma asked her, this question having never been asked of him about anyone other than his Grandfather.

"You know, who's all in your family? If it makes your lips looser, I'll announce Quid Pro Quo, Mr. Prince," she explained carefully, like he had never heard her in the first place. And although she had promised a fair exchange of information, he still felt like she was taking advantage of him and his curiosity. So he decided to play along, if only to learn more about the mysterious woman he was living with.

"Well…my mother is the head of an Ikebana school, and my father is an actor," he answered dutifully, wanting to know more about this woman other than her name, vague residence, and intimidating personality.

"Any maternal grandparents?" she asked him, leaning her hand against her hand in slight interest. A noticeable gleam in her eye that reflected her own inner curiosity.

"Dead," he answered, not quite sure what she was getting at.

"Paternal?"

He paused for but a second before answering, but nevertheless she noticed his slight hesitation.

"My Grandfather died recently actually."

She made a small humming noise before offering her condolences, staring at him for a second longer before returning to what was left of her meal, her bangs covering the top half of her face as she leaned too far over her plate. Another humming noise came from her soon after the abrupt silence, inciting his curiosity about why she asked about his grandparents in the first place.

"What is it?"

"Mmm, no. It's nothing. I knew someone with the surname "Ichijou" once about seven years ago. he was a weird guy. Well, not so much weird as…odd. He couldn't have looked more than forty, but he talked like a great-grandfather. All chivalry and a very cold demeanor. I think his name was…Asano? No, no, it was Asato. Asato Ichijou. Any relation at all?" she asked him, picking her head up from her plate to look at him from under the cover of her bangs. The cold stare she gave him seeming to look at him, inside him, and through him. He'd had enough of looks like that, whether it was from his Grandfather or her.

"No. I've never heard that name," he answered, speaking in a tone similar to the one she had used before. She looked at him for another minute before her face melted into a smile and a warm kind of look he had never seen before took over her as she chuckled a bit in relief.

"Thank God. That man scares the life outta me. I don't know what I'd do if you were related to him. Although even if you are, you don't seem like it. Mr. Prince is too cheerful and warm to be that cold-hearted," she said as she stood up from her seat, both plates in hand as she threw the bones away in a trash bin before setting them in the sink. Takuma stood up and walked across the kitchen to stand behind her, reaching into the dish water and pulling out one of the plates.

"I can do these if you don't mind," he told her, flashing what he thought was a reassuring smile. She seemed to reciprocate it, smiling happily at him before turning away from the sink. For a brief moment he hoped: he hoped that this unusually headstrong woman wouldn't say anything snarky or sarcastic. He was wrong of course, but there was no helping that.

"Looks like a prince, sounds like a prince, but looks like Mr. Prince isn't as useless as a prince," she said, her blue-green eyes flashing mirth as she left the room, walking down the hallway. He watched her receding back before it disappeared behind the mysterious door, waiting a few seconds before taking a glass out of the cupboards and filling it with water. Watching the door, he slipped his blood tablets from his pocket and dropped two in the water, the tablets dissolving and tingeing the water pink before turning it a translucent red. He glanced down at the small box, turning it in his hand and feeling the small tablets move freely through the empty space within. He was running low on his supply, probably enough for four or five days, meaning that he would have to either leave and find a supplier or risk revealing himself and taking blood from an innocent person. Despite the supply however it did not help his regenerative powers. Having slowed to that of a human's, his body now craved the fresh blood of the only human around for miles that could help heal his wound. But taking her blood without her knowing was against his moral standing, and asking for it would be unwise.

Izanami…she was extremely perceptive and had a demeanor almost as cold as his Grandfather and only slightly less deadly than Kiryuu-kun. Of course she'd been living by herself for the last few years, cut off from most human society, that kind of isolation would have turned even the warmest person into a block of ice. She was a person he knew well to be weary of.

"Looks like you found the Kool-Aid. You know, I was saving that for a rainy day," Izanami's voice rang out, startling Takuma out of his contemplation enough to quickly glance down at the glass and sigh in relief that the tablets had completely dissolved. He turned to see her standing a few feet behind him, the door to the secret room slightly ajar, and her glare zeroing in on the drink in his hand.

"Oh, um, yeah. I hope you don't mind," he stammered, going along with her chosen explanation, glancing nervously from Izanami to the glass of pseudo-blood in his hand.

"Not as long as you give me a drink," she said, taking the near-full glass from his hands and putting it to her pale lips. She took a large amount into her mouth and sputtered, choking on the drink before putting a hand up to her mouth in a half-hearted attempt to keep from spitting it out onto the floor. He gave her a half-smile and sympathetic eyes as a small gesture of understanding—for even if it quenched their thirst it was still bland and tasteless, at least to him it was—before taking the glass from her hands. Glaring at him, she turned to the sink and spat out the "vile" liquid, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand before reaching up and opening a different cupboard than the one he had opened before, taking out a half-full canister of this "Kool-Aid" stuff, seeming to check its expiration date before questioning herself about the state of the water pipes.

She turned back to face him, reaching for the glass before staying her hand when he pulled it out of her reach, one eyebrow raised in curiosity.

"Are you sure?" she asked him. He nodded in response, taking a sip and smiling at her as proof that it did not bother him. "Alright, suit yourself. But if you die of food poisoning it's your own fault, Mr. Prince." She walked away from him in strides down the hall, opening the door at the end wide enough for herself to slip through before disappearing down a set of stairs, the door closing with a soft sound. Takuma breathed a sigh of relief before drinking the remaining liquid and placing the empty glass in the dishwater; washing the remaining dishes and placing them in the drying rack.

He left the kitchen then, turning off the light before walking down the hall to the room he was staying in. One hand on the doorknob, he looked to Izanami's door for a brief moment, the door she always seemed to disappear behind when she had the free time. He looked away, entering his borrowed room and closing his door for the night, planning to kill a few hours by reading the books he had found around the house—a few mysteries, a couple non-fiction, and a dictionary. Picking the dictionary up from his bed, he thought back to Izanami's words during dinner. Flipping towards the back of the book, he ran a finger down the list of words on the page, stopping at the term she had used and memorizing it before leaving his room. He knocked repeatedly against the dark-colored wood until he heard her footsteps on the stairs, waiting patiently while her hand turned the brass knob and the door opened enough for Takuma to see her annoyed face.

"How may I help you?" she asked, looking overall bored with his presence alone. He held up the dictionary, one digit pointing at the phrase he had bothered her for.

"Quid pro quo: one thing in return for another. I told you what you wanted to know, so you have to tell me in return," he informed her, closing the book and waiting patiently while she simply stared at him. Before long she moved her eyes away from him and towards the floor, closing her eyes and sighing through her nose in a huff as she seemed to decide something unpleasant. She moved her body out of the slim opening the door provided her and leaned her back against it, closing it completely.

"I might not have people skills and I might come off kind of…cold, but I have my honor as a Kusoichi to uphold so...I don't have any grandparents to speak of. No aunts or uncles either. No cousins, or siblings, or nieces or nephews," Izanami said, effectively listing off every family member she did not have.

"What about your parents?" he asked her quietly, despite knowing full well that she had an estranged father.

"My Dad comes around sometimes to drop off the essentials and talk about the…family business that I have absolutely no interest in. Then he leaves soon after we get into a screaming match," she told him, a wry smile on her face.

Takuma swallowed thickly before asking his final question—a question he already knew as a touchy subject for her. The change in her usually expressionless face was tangible; shifting from the careful guard she kept up to one that was slightly painful.

"She died when I was three. "Stupid, fucking reason" I'm told so often by my Dad whenever I ask," she said, smiling half-heartedly, "I have no memories of her, so I'm not all that attached. It bothers my Dad more than it does me." Takuma felt at a loss then, feeling the same about his own estranged parents, but not exactly worthy of comforting someone who's own mother had died under cloudy circumstances and a father who seemed to want to fight whenever they talked. He decided to try comforting her anyway, knowing the feeling of not having a parent around you during the most crucial times.

"I wasn't close to my parents either; they were busy with work so my Grandfather raised me," Takuma offered, no smile on his face as he looked at her sincerely.

"The same one who died?" he nodded.

"Do you miss him?" Takuma didn't even have to think—nor did he hesitate—before shaking his head no. Why would he when he was the one who killed him for the sole purpose of putting an end to the Ichijou family? Izanami smiled ruefully at this and crossed her arms over her chest, looking down at her sock-covered feet before speaking to him.

"Sometimes…at the end of the day, family isn't defined by blood ties or who gave birth to who. It's defined by who you feel safest with. With whom you can trust and love unconditionally. Family is something that's earned through time. It's almost like a friendship in some ways, but deeper," Izanami told him, her smile strained and small. He copied her smile, nodding his head in understanding before she disappeared back within her secret room, a simple "good night" thrown at him as the door closed in his face. A small smile kept on Takuma's face even after she had left him alone. He felt…lighter somehow, despite the heavy feeling in his body that pervaded blood lust. He was simply taking small comfort in the fact that she felt the same way he did.


	3. 3: Chapter 2

"Leave your arms up and turn this way," Izanami said, issuing simple commands for the blond as she wrapped the clean, white gauze around his thin, pale body, the wound on his chest the only spot that provided any color at all. Takuma turned his body back to face her, the palms of his hands flat against the low ceiling as he kept his arms up above his head, his lower torso the only part of his body that remained clothed while he stood half-naked in his savior's kitchen. A nervous smile twitched a bit on his face as Izanami came closer once more and wrapped her arms around his back, her body momentarily flush against his chest as the roll of gauze passed between her hands, unrolling across his flesh before the feel of her body heat and her hidden curves moved away. It never got old the way nothing seemed to phase her: the body of a skinned rabbit or a nude bird, a half-naked man standing in front of her; although he was sure that while he was unconscious she had seen more of him than just his upper body, seeing as how he had woken in foreign clothes that he was sure were not hers. Which raised the question of who's they were in the first place.

"Alright, unless you plan on walking around half-naked, put your shirt back on." Her cold voice cut through his train of thought and he refocused on her back as she replaced what little amount of gauze there was inside the first-aid kit. "Or, if you plan on giving me a show, don't. I'm not one to complain," she continued, inclining her head towards him to give him a smirk, small human canines flashing at him predatorily, causing him to flinch slightly and move away a step. She laughed once and turned away again, making him feel the fool for falling for her trick.

"No need to be afraid, Mr. Prince. You looked so serious I thought a small joke would help get back your usual demeanor," she explained, closing the lid of the small, red box and turning back to face him, mirth swimming in her blue-green eyes while her thin lips retained her small smirk.

"It doesn't seem like a joke when you say it though," he replied quietly, not wanting to offend her as he slipped the sleeves of a dark blue button-down over his arms, buttoning it up over his bandaged abdomen.

"You wound me, Mr. Prince, I only meant to help. Speaking of wounds, I'm almost out of my medical supplies." She laid a hand on top of the box sitting on the kitchen table and gave him a sour look, silently blaming him for the drop in supplies.

"I-I'm sorry for the trouble," he stuttered making her snicker in response.

"Don't wet yourself. The good news is there'll be more tomorrow." She trailed off intentionally, picking up the half empty box and carrying to back to the only other door in the singular hallway besides the bedroom and the hallway: the bathroom.

"And the bad news?" he asked when she gave no indication of continuing on her tangent. He ventured a bit into the hallway and waited while she put the box away in a small cupboard inside. She hesitated a moment before closing the door, and inclining her head towards him, the eyes on the reflection in the bathroom room mirror swiveling towards his own reflective figure.

"He'll most likely try to shoot you when he gets here," she said, plain and simple and easy, as if she was talking about the weather. Takuma gave her a worried glance, his eyebrows furrowing together in confusion and slight alarm. Izanami's face remained expressionless—not even her eyes betrayed any emotion she kept welled up inside of her—as she continued, "And unlucky for you, I won't be around tomorrow to make sure my hard work didn't go to waste."

He opened his mouth to ask who this mystery person was and why she was leaving, but before he could utter a single syllable she turned away from the bathroom mirror and smiled a disarming smile at him, taking him by surprise that despite her harshness she could show something so sweet looking. It took him a moment to figure out that she was tricking him once again, and when he frowned and showed his confusion she snickered and returned to her usual smirk.

"Don't worry, Mr. Prince, I'm not abandoning you to die, I'm just going hunting, we're almost out of meat. I should be back before he gets here," she told him walking back towards the kitchen, pushing her way past him. He turned to follow her, watching as she crouched down in front of fridge and rummaged through one of the shelves.

"And if you're not?"

"Keep low," she said cryptically, "he tends to aim high." He was both confused and concerned as to how this person was and why he would shoot someone indiscriminately, so he asked her who he was and why he would attempt to kill him. "He's my father. And how would you react if you went to visit your only daughter and found, instead of her, a strange man there at her place with no idea as to where she is or when she's coming back? If it were me, I'd probably shoot too."

* * *

The next day she rose early and left, a shot gun slung across her back along with a couple .22s strapped to her belt. Keeping to his promise not to leave the house, Takuma spent the day inside, sleeping well into the afternoon and reading the few books she owned. While the temptation of seeing what was behind the mysterious door lingered in the back of his mind, he kept to his promise and kept clear of the door. However, when staying in the house got to be too much for him, he stepped outside for a few minutes of fresh air and a change of scenery. Contrary to the stuffiness and warmth of the one story house, the air outside was crisp and cool to the touch, a slight breeze bringing with it the smell of forest decay and animal blood.

Takuma's throat began to burn, starting as a dull ache as it spread from the back of his throat all the way to the center of his chest. He closed his eyes as the arching sun made its way behind the line of trees surrounding Izanami's property. Behind his eyelids his irises glowed a dull red, and for a second—just the smallest, most insignificant second—he imagined hot, red blood dripping down his throat, cooling the agonizing ache that lingered there whenever he was around Izanami. The air changed then, flowing from the east rather than the west, and a sharp odor hit him like a ton of bricks. His eyelids flashed open and his irises returned to their normal bright green color. He inhaled again and paid more attention to the details the scent gave. The small aroma of gun powder and smoke, mixed perspiration and the heady scent of a male body traveled on the breeze that flowed around him. He sharpened his ears and heard the heavy snap and drag as he walked through the isolated woods, the sounds growing louder and closer.

Takuma froze as the stranger broke through the line of trees despite knowing he would be there eventually. The stranger froze as well, his figure stiffening as he looked up and spotted the young man standing in front of his daughter's home. He was a tall, rough-looking man, just about a few centimeters taller than Takuma himself, with short black hair and coal black eyes that seemed to be set in the same cold stare that Izanami's seemed to be perpetually set in. After no more than a minute of perusing the other, the stranger—lightening quick to any human's eyes—pulled out an old .44, cold eyes locked on him as he pointed the barrel at Takuma's forehead.

"Who the hell are you boy, and why are you on my Daughter's property?" he asked in a deep, equally rough voice as he stepped slowly closer, the heavy pack on his back slipping off of his shoulder and onto the ground with a thud. Takuma slowly raised his hands in a non-threatening gesture—despite being a vampire with accelerated healing a gunshot wound to his person would weaken his body's already slow healing power.

"My name is Takuma, I'm a… an acquaintance of Izanami—" Takuma began, the subtle sound of female footsteps catching his attention before the soft click of a gun being cocked resounded in the air. Izanami's voice rang out loud and clear as she stepped out from the far corner of her small home, a fair distance away from where the man had appeared from, a string of geese slung over her shoulder and an amused grin on her face.

"For the last damn time, Mr. Prince, call me Iz. And Dad, put the gun down, we both know you're a terrible shot. All you'll end up doing is making more work for me," she said, walking towards them as normally as she would any other time, all the time the barrel of her own .22 pointed at her father. Takuma's brows furrowed together, knowing that Izanami's relationship with her father was strained at best, but to the point that she would point a loaded gun at him?

"Who is this, Izanami? Some stray dog you happened to pick up?" he asked her, his eyes glancing towards her, but his pistol never wavering from its potential target.

"A dog? Don't make me laugh; he's too timid and cute for that. He's more like a pup I rescued from the rabble." As she spoke, she placed herself in front of Takuma, the gun now pointed at her instead of him.

"You always did want a mangy mutt, and now you got one." His gun never lowered from its' position, but a small look of uncertainty edged its' way into his eyes as he glared from Takuma to Izanami.

"Can't blame me for picking up the first one I see." It was a strange conversation, and not one that Takuma completely understood. Nearest he could tell, he was probably supposed to feel insulted. "Mr. Prince, it's time to change you're bandages. Go inside and get started, I'll be there in a minute," she told him, never once taking her eyes off of the man in front of her. Takuma opened his mouth to argue but closed it instead, deciding to stay out of any bad blood that was currently circulating between the two. Slowly backing away from her and her father, he retreated inside hesitantly, one last glance thrown towards Izanami in worry before he closed the door and started undressing, bloodied and soiled bandages dropping to the floor as he examined himself.

The gash that had once been an angry red had paled some, and the blood that had been leaking through Izanami's crude job of stitches had clotted over the wound. Around the edges the sliced flesh and muscle began to grow back, albeit slowly and imperceptivity to the human eye. He winced at the poor sight of it and dug through his borrowed pants pocket, retrieving from it the small box of blood tablets. Moving away from the window where the stand-off continued to take place with neither side giving in to the other, he opened the small container and assessed the amount inside.

_I'm almost out. I barely have enough for two days at most, _he thought to himself pursing his lips as he took one out of the package and put it in his mouth, snapping it in half between his teeth and furrowing his brows in distaste. His body was starting to reject the tablets, not in the sense that it didn't tide over his undying thirst for the time being, but in the sense that the taste was almost unbearable to deal with. He needed food, real food, and now he realized it was mistake to let that smallest thought, the simplest day dream, slip through his consciousness. His teeth began to hurt once more and his throat burned like it was lit on fire, but the only thing he could do at the moment was take another blood tablet and chew on it, dragging it out way past the point of it being even slightly solid, so long as the ache in his throat stayed as a dull ember.

* * *

When he lived with his grandfather, he had grown accustomed to being taught to one day lead the Ichijou family, and of the constant silence that pervaded every crevice of the house he had grown up in when Kaname was not present. It was a silence he dreaded when he was forced to go home for the holidays or at the request of his grandfather, and one he relished escaping when he would return to the Academy. However, in this present circumstance he would gladly take one more day in the silence encrusted world, than one more minute of this dinner that gave true meaning to the words "silence", tension", and "murderous".

In the five days since he had awoken to find himself in the care of this strange woman, he had grown to both expect and fear Izanami's words, being as harsh and cold as they were. Today, however, was an exception since it filled him with relief when she broke the silence that seemed to be permeated with constant on-edge tension and the brief scrapes of silverware against platters.

"If I wanted to listen to knives scraping against dishes, I would have kicked _you_ out as soon as my supplies was delivered," to which she gestured to her father with a knife, "and I would have left _you_ to die in the hole I found you in," to which she gestured to the blond on her left, "now either one of you picks a topic, or I'll get my gun and finish what life started," she threatened, bringing the knife down onto the table, jamming it into the wood and leaving it to stick up menacingly as she glared at us, an annoyed sneer on her face when her father glared at her.

"Why is this pup wearing my clothes?" he asked, turning his glare from Izanami to Takuma.

"Would you rather have found him in bandages and nude?" she returned, fingers curling around the handle of the knife and jerking it out of the table in a swift motion, as if it were stuck in something much softer and malleable than wood. Takuma blushed at the thought, if only because it would have only made him uncomfortable, seeing as Izanami tended to not be squeamish—her bored-bordering-on uninterested expression whenever he removed his borrowed shirt proved that much.

The man, whom Takuma now knew as Yosuno, grumbled in discontent, being neither happy that this blond man was wearing his clothes for the time being or the point his daughter so plainly made, and went back to the slapdash meal Izanami had prepared. Takuma, feeling uncomfortable causing any more discord between the two, quickly spoke, suggested to them that he could change into the clothes he had worn before arriving here.

"That won't be possible unless you plan on covering key areas of your body," Izanami said as if she were talking about the weather. Takuma looked at her confused until she looked up at him and explained. "You're clothes were filthy, torn, and looked like rags, so I used them as such. I may have also used them to patch some holes in my clothes."

Takuma looked at her both shocked and surprised before it melted into an amused half-smile. "You could have asked me, I would have still let you if they were in that state," he told her, earning a weary glance from the woman beside him while Yosuno continued to glare at the both of them.

"Seeing as you were unconscious during that time I found it impossible to do so, Mr. Prince," she told him, taking another bite of the weird concoction she had prepared, but despite its' looks it still tasted good. Takuma chuckled good-naturedly and took a bite as well, still trying to make the best of a bad situation as Yosuno continued to glare hatefully at the both of them. No more than ten seconds later he stood up abruptly from the table, silverware clattering noisily against the half-empty plate.

"I'm going to sleep. You two make me sick," Yosuno said, before turning to leave, walking down the short hallway to the mystery door, disappearing behind it. They stayed silent for awhile after his departure. Takuma was silent out of sheer awkwardness while Izanami stayed silent simply because she was clearing off her father's plate onto her own, and continued to eat as if he were never there in the first place.

"Don't take it to heart; he hates rainbows and butterflies, too." Izanami spoke up then, startling Takuma. He raised an eyebrow in curiosity and asked her what she meant. "Well," she set down her fork and knife and leaned her back against the chair, crossing her arms and looking up at the ceiling, searching for words, "I don't know about him, but to me you come off as a teddy bear-shaped lollipop. You're non-lethal."

At this Takuma smiled, unsure of both what to say to this and whether this was statement was in his favor or not. _Usually she would be right, but…I'm so hungry,_ he thought, standing up from the table and clearing away the remaining dishes for her, cleaning off what little remained of his own portion into the trash bin and setting the pot of leftovers inside the fridge.

"Mr. Prince, where are the knives?" Izanami asked him, setting her empty plate in the water as she searched the counter next to the sink. Takuma rinsed the plate he had washed and set it on the other side of the sink in the drying rack, looking over at Izanami as she searched the counter and table top for the missing knives.

"I put them in the water, Izanami." His hands slipped in, aiming to bring out one of the knives to show her and put an end to her fruitless search.

She turned on him and set a glare on the blonde, a snarl set on her lips as she chided him. "You're not supposed to leave knives in the water or you'll—" Takuma let out a startled gasp as slim metal sliced his right palm. He pulled out his hand, water and drops of blood falling back into the dish water and dripping onto the floor, staining them both red. "Cut yourself," Izanami finished with a sigh, grabbing his injured hand and turning it upright so the blood would pool into the center of his palm. "It doesn't look too deep. Run your hand under cold water while I get a Band-Aid," she told him, letting go of his hand and turning on her heel. Under her breath she grumbled obscurities—most of which seemed to be about his "inexperience".

Takuma turned on the water and, looking briefly over his shoulder, raised his hand to his mouth and licked timidly at his blood, lapping at it as it pooled and stained the skin of his palm. When a good deal of it was cleaned away he let his hand drop away from his face wearily and ran it under the cold water, watching remorsefully as the little blood that continued to flow from his wound flowed down the drain. True, his own blood would do little to quench his thirst and even less to heal his wound, but the small amount of relief that was brought with it that let him have a bit more of a grip on himself.

Behind him he heard Izanami's footsteps come back towards him, and a small, strong hand on his shoulder as she turned him away from the sink. "I'm going to pretend for your sake that the blood loss is finally getting to you, because why else would you ignore my specific instructions to not leave the house, and put sharp, pointy objects under layers of suds and dirty water besides plain stupidity." As she spoke she wrapped one of the Band-Aids over the curve of his thumb, and another two over the edge of his hand where the line of red lead towards his wrist.

"Do that again and it won't be the knife that hurts you, Mr. Prince," she threatened. Takuma chuckled at her words and pressed his right injured hand against his wounded chest.

"It was you who said they'd rather their hard work not go to waste, wasn't it?" he commented smiling a bright smile at her who in turn scowled at the reminder. Nevertheless, the injury did nothing to stop her from shoving his right shoulder rather harshly and taking his position in front of the sink, reaching one hand into the water. She ran her hand through the dingy water, searching for the drain plug until her fingers came across an object slim and sharp, its' blade sitting upright under the water. She followed the blade to its handle and pulled it up out of the water, holding it in a position that one could interpret as threatening—one that Takuma bought into.

"Don't get your hopes up, Mr. Prince. I have a very small empathetic side and an even smaller tolerance level," she growled, throwing the knife into the empty sink basin before plunging her hand once more into the water and dragging out the plug, the murky liquid creating a small whirlpool as it fell through the drain. "I'm not cute and cuddly like you, Mr. Prince. I'm lethal. So don't assume things you don't know," Izanami said, turning her back on him as she strode down the hallway. Takuma's smile dimmed in her lack of presence and he turned back to the dual basined sink. Taking the plug and reinserting it in the drain, he refilled the basin with hot water and soap—after, of course, removing the knives from both basins and setting them aside of the counter.

For a few minutes he went to washing the remaining plates and silverware, setting them aside on the drying rack. One plate, however, slipped from his grasp, glancing off the edge of the counter and falling to the floor with a crash. Shards of ceramic flew across the tiled floor from where it fell, yet it fell on deaf ears as Takuma fell against the sink, leaning heavily against it as a bolt of pain struck through his chest, his heart throbbing erratically and offbeat. He panted heavy breaths as the wave came and went, each inflation of his lungs bringing with it a small, sharp stab.

A heavy hand fell on Takuma's shoulder and he turned, shocked and wide-eyed, as Izanami looked at him with mixed worry and confusion. She pressed a hand against the side of his neck, measuring out his heartbeat while he continued to take in deep breaths. She sighed heavily, her hand falling away from his neck and trailing down his arm, tightening around his right bicep and pulling him up to his feet. "This is why I told you to take it easy, Mr. Prince. Your insides are worse than your outsides, even if your outsides are healing as normal." At this Takuma inwardly chuckled despite the pain he felt inside. While to her his slow healing was normal and possibly exemplary—despite this sudden wave of pain—for him it was slow bordering on stopped, for sure he needed nutrients—blood to be exact.

Then he saw the knife. Not the knife he had accidently cut himself with, his nose could tell him that much, but the one that Izanami had brought out of the water, the sliver-thin edge of it glittering red. His eyes glowed red for a fraction of a second and as he looked to her hand to see if she had cut herself, he noticed that her fingertips were indeed slit. Why she hadn't bothered to bandage them he didn't understand, but, then again, he didn't understand her most of the time anyway.

"I'm sorry," he said, using her body to keep his own from falling again. She scoffed, wrapping his arm around her neck and shoulders and helping him to stand before leading him towards the guest bedroom.

"Don't apologize for something like this, Mr. Prince. It's not like you injured yourself intentionally after all," she told him, supporting his weight until she dropped him onto his bed with a heavy thud. Takuma groaned and rolled onto his back, glancing out of the corner of his eyes at Izanami as she leaned over him, grabbing his jaw with her fingertips—the ones he suspected to have been sliced—and forced his head to face towards her. "But if you really are sorry, then you can make it up to me tomorrow by helping me out with my garden. And don't look at me like that, where else do you think I get radishes and carrots?" She let go of his jaw then and left, a wave thrown carelessly over her shoulder before she shut the door and left him in minimal silence and total darkness.

Within the darkness, however, there was a flash of silver as a knife was turned this way and that within the blonde man's hands while in his mind a few choice sentences rolled around. _I'm not cute and cuddly like you. You're non-lethal._ If only she knew how true those words used to be. Bringing the knife closer to his face, he saw within the darkness the small, soft gleam of red along the edge. Inhaling tentatively he let fantasies cloud his mind: warm blood soothing the burn in his throat, healing his wound, feeling rejuvenated. Somewhere in the back of his mind he acknowledged the fact that he was beginning to think like Aidou, yet that part of him wasn't in control of his body as a pale pink tongue slithered out between his lips, lightly pressing the flat of it against the blade and trailing along its smooth surface, collecting the blood that lingered there. With his eyes closed he brought his tongue back within the confines of his mouth, thinking on the flavor he tasted in Izanami's blood, and grimacing as the flavor received a name.

_Bitter._


	4. 4: Chapter 3

Izanami swept up the shards of the broken platter, glancing mildly towards the counter before dumping the useless shards in the trash, placing the broom and its' dust pan back in its corner of the kitchen. Flipping off the kitchen lights, she retreated back down the hall, casting a spare glance at the door leading to her impromptu guest before slipping behind the door at the end of the hall. Gun powder reached her nose as she descended the stairs, the steps creaking under her weight as she approached a large table strewn with weapons of various lethal intent and size. Beside the table in front of a deconstructed .44 sat her father, Yosuno, cleaning each component with a careful touch while in the background the subtle notes of an unknown station played from the old radio sitting upon the bookshelf behind him.

"What was that noise before?" he asked his daughter as she sat across from him and restarted her work on her own guns.

"Fairytale Prince upstairs had a pain wave and dropped a plate. Nothing a good night's sleep can't cure," Izanami replied, eyeing the muzzle of her rifle before snapping it closed and laying it on the table. Yosuno looked up from his work and sneered, commenting upon her choice of words.

"Night isn't when they sleep, it's when they hunt."

Izanami looked over at him out with boredom before adding, "As long as he's quiet I don't care when he sleeps, so long as he heals." At this Yosuno scoffed before reassembling his gun and moving onto another caliber.

Halfway through their maintenance he spoke up and asked her in a low tone if he had taken the bait. Izanami snorted in a mock laugh, removing a small cleaning tool from the muzzle of her hand gun before answering humorously, "Of course he did. If you set a slice bread in front of a starving man, would he turn his nose away and shun what is offered to him? Then again, I doubt Mr. Prince knows it was offered willingly." Yosuno's lip curled in malice and disgust before he moved to stand only to be forced down by Izanami's cocking of her gun, looking as if she was checking it for irregularities instead of threatening him subtly.

"I didn't fix him up and make him all new and pretty just so you could shoot him like a rabid dog," she told him breezily, glaring up at him with marble eyes and disinterest. Yosuno scowled at her and slammed his fist down on the table, bullet casings rolling off the edge and onto the dirt floor with a dull thud at the sudden shock.

"He _is_ a rabid dog! And if you don't kill him while he's weak, he'll kill you before you regret it," he halfway shouted, unknowing if despite his weakened state Takuma could hear them through the floor boards.

"Even so, I doubt he'll have the guts to do it. And the Association agrees that a vampire has to attack a human before they waste them. This one…is harmless," Izanami told him before he had the chance to argue further. Yosuno tsked before falling back into his chair, angry that his daughter would defy him so easily despite being so obedient all these years. Just one of the few similarities between them it seemed. He didn't push the subject any further, knowing that Izanami was one to back down so easily when she was so adamant about something. Even when he told her to live here in these God forsaken woods she didn't argue this much.

He sighed angrily and picked up the weapon he had discarded in his moment of rage and continued cleaning the muzzle. "Report," he commanded, looking up at her only when she didn't answer immediately. "I said: report."

"I can't. There is nothing to report," Izanami answered him, reassembling another of her collection before standing and striding across the room to the rack of pistols and firearms placed neatly upon it, extracting after careful consideration a 10mm.

"What the hell do you mean?"

"I mean that there's nothing. Zilch. Zip. Zero. Nada. His mansion is gone. His staff has disappeared," Izanami clarified, walking back to her spot at the old, wooden table with slow, casual steps; as if this conversation held no weight in the forefront of her mind. "The only evidence that Asato Ichijou ever existed is the small pile of dust he left behind before it floated away on the wind. A shame that your revenge couldn't be satisfied—"

_Smack._

A loud slap followed her casual remark causing her head to snap to the side at the force of it, yet despite the stinging sensation that followed she smiled at the reaction, knowing full well that she had struck a chord. "Don't you dare talk that way to me, you little trollop," he growled lowly while leaning over the table, his hand frozen in the air where it had gone after he had slapped her. She wouldn't grace him with a slap—no, that would have been much too kind—so instead she leveled her marble gaze on him, curling her hand into a decent sized fist and shooting it forward, the skin of her knuckles meeting the stubble and skin of his cheek before his own head snapped back at the suddenness. His body followed his head soon after the sudden collision, his legs stepping back so as to catch his body, making his feet trip over the legs of his chair and his back collide with the bookshelf, causing the radio to dance upon the shelf before plummeting to the ground, the music sputtering once or twice before dying out altogether while her father hit hard-packed dirt of the basement floor.

"Don't take your anger out on me just because you were too slow to kill him yourself," Izanami told him, looking down at him with as much a cruel gaze as the one he threw at her as he scrambled back up to his feet. His body shook with the strength it held to restrain himself, to refrain from punishing her correctly for her defiance. "I expect you to leave tomorrow as per usual: before noon with zero pleasantries."

With this simple command held in the air, she turned and left, retreating upstairs to her living room couch and leaving him to take her room downstairs. "Don't try any funny business tonight. It's finders' keepers."

* * *

It was in the darkness of the night that he hadn't expected to find her, sprawled out as she was on the loveseat in her living room. Originally he had come out of his room a few hours after she had left him in order to find another book to read that night, having finished the few she had brought him few days beforehand. Now he stood unsure of himself as he questioned what to do with his sleeping caretaker. As it was—as a gentleman—he couldn't simply leave her there on something that was obviously too small for her long form, yet neither could he approach her because—despite the bitterness—her blood had done little to sate his hunger for the time being; no, it had only aroused his senses and made him desire more.

So here he stood in the middle of a dilemma: save her blood or risk his hunger; and like a fool he risked his hunger, if only because this would be of small compensation for the amount of kindness she had given him in the week-and-a-half he had been there. He sighed dejectedly before holding his breath, kneeling down beside her on the floor and sneaking his hands under her knees and shoulders, freezing slightly as she stirred in her sleep before falling again to the depths of unconsciousness. He let his breath out in a sigh of relief before regaining it with a bit of her scent as he brought her close to his chest and lifted her up off the couch.

_This won't get any easier, but I hope to at least get used to it, _Takuma thought, shuffling Izanami a bit so her head wouldn't hang off his arm, and instead fitted against his shoulder comfortably. Unfortunately for him, said action caused her to stir again, her blue-green eyes peeking out from underneath her eyelids and peering at him in question shutting them tight again and laying her head on his shoulder. For a moment he asked himself if she had grown to somewhat trust him, but the thought soon disappeared from his mind as she wetted her lips and spoke quietly, huskily, to him a warning.

"I have a knife strapped to my thigh, you try anything I deem unnecessary and I won't hesitate to make that hole in your chest wider."

It was a fatal warning, one he should take seriously and without amusement, yet despite the lethality of her words, he chuckled, a soft rumbling in his chest as he crossed the threshold of his room and laid her down on the unmade bed, laying her straight with her head on the pillow before tucking the bed sheet around her body. When he tucked the sheet around her shoulders he paused a moment, taking in the redness of her cheek and the other asymmetrical side; recognizing it as something he often saw on Aidou whenever he upset Kaname.

Wordlessly he stood and left for the bathroom, retrieving from it a damp washcloth after running it under cold water—not that he would have ran it under hot water had there been any at night. When he came back he knelt down by her side once more, taking small delight in the sight of her peaceful, un-harsh face before he pressed a corner of the washcloth to her face, padding it every so often so as to cool down the reddened flesh.

"What are you doing, Mr. Prince," Izanami said, her voice contrasting with her face as she lay as still and peaceful as before. He paused before going back to the task at hand, a gentle smile playing on his lips as he answered her.

"It wouldn't be right for a pretty young lady to have a mark on her face," he said, rightly and justly.

"Save the eloquent speeches for the noblemen, Mr. Prince, I don't require it," she said harshly, the only evidence of her annoyance the small downturn of her lips. He nodded despite her eyes not seeing and stopped his dabbing, standing up and making to leave before her voice stopped him again. "I didn't say you could stop."

"But you said—"

"I said to stop the needless chatter, I didn't say to stop your actions," she clarified, cracking open one eyelid to peer at him through the darkness despite her eyesight being too weak to see him clearly, whereas he could see every specific detail of her face in the blackness of the room. He smiled, genuinely, and retraced his steps, sitting beside her on the bed this time and applying the coolness of another corner to her warm cheek, dabbing it lightly as she dozed off under his watch. Takuma remarked once again upon the amount of trust she had in him, however little it may be, and looked at the knife glinting mutely in the dark beside her, regaining whatever shred of sanity he had left to stay his hunger.

At least, for the night that is.

* * *

The next day the sun rose over the curve of the hillside as it so often, and by the time it had risen above his head, Yosuno left true to their agreement: before noon and with no pleasantries tossed either way, only a simple farewell was given as he left out the door and down the curve of the mountain the cabin was situated on. As if he were to be back before sundown when in reality he wouldn't be back for another two weeks—as was the agreement in the frequency of his visits with supply in tow for Izanami.

She, having been through these visits enough, effortlessly returned to her normal everyday doings. I.e. reading, cleaning—house and weapons—, and making sure her vegetable garden didn't dry up in the noonday sun. Takuma, having been tense more so than usual with the arrival of Izanami's father, relaxed a bit when he woke up some hours later and found him gone. Briefly he wondered why Yosuno didn't stay longer and why Izanami seemed to be unfazed by his sudden arrival and departure before he remembered the standoff yesterday and the awkward dinner conversation. So instead of asking Izanami—who was currently sitting on the loveseat, bent over what he saw to be a small metal box—about his departure, he instead asked her what was in her hands.

"It's just an old radio. It broke last night and now I can't get. It. To. _Work!_" she answered, hitting the side of the rectangular box several times, each hit bringing with it a spatter of crackles and pops, but not a single clear musical note. Takuma—amused by her childish antics—took the radio from her and gave it a once over, turning it this way and that between his hands.

"May I?" he asked her gesturing with the broken radio. She scoffed at the notion that someone like him, a man whom she had taken the liberty of calling "Mr. Prince" could fix something she couldn't.

"I'd say: be my guest, but since you already are I'll just let you have at it," she answered, standing up from her seat. "And hey, if you fix it I'll even give you any reward you want," she continued flippantly while she pushed past him into the kitchen, confident that he couldn't fix it. And less than pleased when several minutes later he asked for a battery and swapped it for the old one inside; the music once again pouring smoothly and freely from its small speaker. Enraged, she took the radio from him and slammed it down on the table, the music stuttering once before continuing its sweet ballad.

"No one likes a smartass," she muttered, glaring at him beneath her bangs while he smiled nervously, both used to and unnerved by Izanami's character.

"It was easy to miss, Izanami. It's all right."

"Just shut up and tell me what you want," she spat, embarrassment leaking through her thick mask before it hardened into its usual rigid and sardonic persona. He smiled as warmly and as friendly as possible, unsure of how she would react and how extreme it would be before he told her his request.

"I'd like a dance."

The request hung in the air like the moon in the sky; a proverbial elephant in the room so to speak as she processed his request and thought of an adequate response.

"I'll do anything except that."

His smile faltered a bit before rising up to its former perkiness. "But all I want is one dance with you," he continued despite the dangers that lined this path to a shallow acquaintanceship.

"Mr. Prince, the only time I'll ever dance is when a duck walks through that door, plucks itself, and cooks itself for my next meal. And frankly I don't see that ever happening. So you can imagine what my response is to your request," she said dryly, making it as cold and cutthroat as a deadly threat. Takuma frowned, brows scrunching together in slight disappointment as he regarded her and her response, coming to a singular conclusion that either she simply didn't want to or—more likely—that she had never danced given that she was cut off from most of humanity. Deciding to take a shot he went with the latter, knowing that despite her past responses she would react coldly and threateningly.

"Do you not know how to dance, Izanami?" he asked her delicately, not wanting to make her feel embarrassed or insulted. Her reaction, however, contradicted what he had seen and experienced thus far as she leveled a cold look on him and calmly, mutely, took the radio from the table, removed its single battery, placed them back on the table separately and left the room, leaving him to watch her back as it receded behind the mystery door and down a flight of stairs before the door shut, leaving him in minimal silence with nothing but a tune-less radio and single battery.

* * *

A few hours later, when the sun outside had hidden itself behind mist and mountain and bathed the small home in twilight, Takuma—who had been deeply engrossed in one of her books—was startled as the mystery door flung open and hit against the adjoining wall. Curious, Takuma looked up from the book and watched silently from her couch as Izanami stomped down the hall and disappeared into the kitchen, out of Takuma's vision before she returned again with radio in hand. She stopped in front of him, glaring down at him a moment before thrusting the radio in his face and causing him to look up at her curiously.

"Umm…is there something wrong with the radio, Izanami?" he asked tentatively, looking between her irritated face and the slightly abused music box.

"One dance, you lead, and if I hear one sound when I step on your feet, I will douse your wound in alcohol and leave it to burn," she explained, retracting the radio and setting it aside on the end table next to him before folding her arms across her chest and tapping her foot impatiently as she waited for him to stand. Chuckling, he closed the book and set it aside, exchanging it with the radio as he turned it on and turned the knob to a classical station before setting it on top of the book and standing up.

"Slow dance or waltz?"

"Whichever requires the least amount of touching," she answered, unfolding her arms and letting them dangle by her side as she continued to look at him sourly. Takuma, undeterred by her attitude, took her left hand in his and placed the other on his shoulder before hesitantly putting his hand on her waist, her immediate recoil before slipping into a rigid posture doing nothing to deter him from enjoying himself. They started off slow with him leading them step by misplaced step, out of tune with the music playing softly, harmlessly, in the background. They weaved back and forth, to and fro, with the occasional misstep every five or six moves as Takuma guided them through a dance he knew to the core of his heart, while Izanami stumbled through the length of it, uncharacteristically awkward as she stepped on his toes time and time again. Thankfully they weren't wearing any shoes, so Takuma could save himself the pain that would have come from her usual steel-toed boots.

He didn't show any pain when she did, all he did was smile politely and hum one-two-three in time with the music. Halfway through it dawned on him that her acceptance of a request she had deemed "ridiculous" was unusual to say the least. So he asked her why she had changed her mind, and her answer satisfied his curiosity, no matter how much it unnerved him.

"I just thought you deserved a treat for putting up with my Dad last night. Although, I'll admit I also wanted to see if you would get winded or have another wave of pain if we did this. But whether you suffer or not, I believe it's important to at least dance once with someone."

"You've never danced with your father? Not even when you were little?" he asked her, a small frown on his face as his brows knitted together.

"Dancing is not all that important to him, and neither is it to me. Even now I still think it's a waste of time. Honestly I don't see the appeal, even now," she answered, loosening her already lax grip on his hand and looking straight into his eyes with her own half-lidded ones. Honestly he had only asked her for a dance in hopes to loosen her up after what he deemed to be a stressful visit, but now he saw that it was only a selfish request on his part based on his shallow views. But now that she had provided him with a small insight to her lack of experience, he found himself compelled to provide her with a happy memory, no matter how short-lived it would be.

So he tightened his grip around her hand, and plastering another smile in place, he brought her closer to him, pulling her flush up against him as he slowed down their dance to a small shuffle. Their bodies swayed back and forth to the background music and while they moved her hard expression softened, and the sharp glint in her marble eyes dulled with it.

"It's pretty obvious you think a great deal of it. So tell me, what is so great about it?" she asked him, gripping his hand tighter than before, although it was still loose by anyone's standards. Takuma thought for a moment, having never considered it something to think about. Wasn't it just fun to do? Didn't it make people happy? The faces of the girls he saw at the dances and balls—both human and vampire—were always filled with joy and happiness. Never had he met a woman who seemed to detest the very idea of it all.

"Well," he began, "it's expressive…artistic…it lets you express emotion…" he fumbled for ideas and while he did so Izanami grew bored with the long silence—exempting the classical music playing in the background—and laid her head on his chest, listening to his heart and checking to see if he had grown quiet because of some internal distress. "It displays affection and intimacy as well," he finished, mistaking her action as one of "opening up".

She hummed in response, half taking in his words as she listened to the slightly irregular beats within his chest cavity. "I'll be sure to remember that. We should stop now; I need to check your wound," she stated, extracting herself from his small embrace and beginning to unbutton his borrowed shirt. When she reached the under layer of bandages she unknotted them and pushed them aside, revealing the pale flesh beneath, it's wound covered in pale pink tissue and marred with coal black stitches. Indifferent towards his injury she placed a hand on his chest, her thumb edging the stitches and causing him to wince a bit at the small sting the action brought.

"Next time you want a dance," she pressed her thumb harder against his wound, his hand coming up to grip hers, but not remove it, "remember this pain. Don't exert yourself for needless things," she said coldly, glaring at him. He took her hand from his chest and held it in his, all the while the cold stare did not leave her face.

"I don't find it needless, so I'm free to ask again if you please," he said, a small smile on his face as he brought her hand up to his lips and kissed it softly—a cheeky action if she ever saw one—and caused her to recoil violently and slap his hand away. A shocked and repulsed look crossed her face briefly before it transformed into a scowl.

"Try that again and it'll be more than a slap on the hand I give you, Mr. Prince," she stated, reaching down next to her to turn off the radio, its sweet song stopping abruptly, unfinished.

"I'll be sure to remember that," he murmured, slighted but not undeterred in his personal mission to have her open up more. The dull ache in his throat, having throbbed pitifully in tune to her heart beat the moment he had pulled her closer to himself, stopped. Replaced instead by the small challenge he had set himself. _How long will it take before I am healed,_ he wondered, _to have her react to me in a way less than full of contempt?_


	5. 5: Chapter 4

Takuma lay nestled beneath the sheets, his body turned away from the mild light streaming in through the cracks between the wooden panes of the window and the gray checkered curtains. Beneath his sheets he unconsciously clutched his chest, his heart, and curled further into the pillow beneath his head. Did his wound hurt? Did he feel the piece of muscle missing from its outer edge? Could he picture the jagged edge that had taken the place of the smooth, flawless finish? Izanami couldn't tell as she watched his body twitch and his forehead crease, like he was actually trying to picture it.

_If _I _couldn't see it when it was looking me dead in the eye, then I doubt you can, Takuma,_ she thought from her place beside the closed door. Earlier she had come in with a request short of a demand, and although she had been loud all morning, he had neglected to awaken. Even when the door had bounced against the wall he hadn't so much as twitched. She sighed before approaching him, soft footsteps crossing the floorboards until her knees brushed the edge of the little used mattress.

Silently she asked him another question. Do you feel pain? Do you burn? She leaned down, a small smile—nothing more than a small upturn of her lip—graced her face as she leaned down and asked him, nearly whispered in his ear, another question.

"Do you need blood?"

Takuma's breath caught and his body jolted underneath the sheets as Izanami straightened back up and took the edge of his thin blanket in hand, ripping it from his body and shocking him awake as the mid-morning air leached the heat from his bare skin, the only cover on his body being the bright green briefs that covered his groin, the slightly grayed bandages that wrapped around his wound, and his hands that rubbed over gooseflesh and did little in way of preserving his modesty.

"I said, _"Get up"_ Mr. Prince. I need to change your bandages," Izanami stated, ignoring the questioning look he gave her as he used his legs to help him cover himself, reaching out with one of his hands in an attempt to grab back the sheet she let dangle on the floor.

"Izanami, _please!_ Have you no modesty?!" he asked her as she held it just out of reach, growing tired of his spiel on modesty and virtue. What need did she have of modesty and virtue and all that nonsense way out here in the woods?

"Enough with the hysterics, Mr. Prince. Who do you think cleaned you and clothed you when you were a bloodied mess with no consciousness?" was her reply before she relinquished the sheet to him, allowing him to cover his lower body before sitting up straight and loosening the knot at his side. "Che, modesty. Tell me, were all the other boys in your class as modest as you are?" she asked, pushing his hands away when they fumbled with the knot and picking it apart easily before unwinding the single long strand from his body.

Takuma pondered her question seriously, filtering through Aidou's frequent displays of false affection for the Day class girls and Kain's tendency of unbuttoned shirts. He could always tell her about Shiki, but he felt that she would only take it the wrong way if he told her he was a male model. The easiest route for sure would be to name Kaname, but somehow he couldn't bring himself to say his name. So he kept silent, letting her think what she want as she revealed his wound to the open air, prodding the tender flesh gently before leaving the room to retrieve the first-aid kit.

In the few seconds she was gone Takuma retrieved his borrowed pants from the day before and slipped them on, patting the right pocket once to make sure his tablets were still where he left them. Whether he did this for comfort or not he wasn't sure, he just knew that after today he'd be down to his last tablet. After today he'd have to decide between leaving in the hopes of finding a supplier in his current state, or feeding on Izanami. Neither option was satisfactory, but the weight of the former outweighed the weight of the latter in terms of the risk involved. Nevertheless, if he could avoid the latter option at all costs he would be grateful.

"Oh good, you're already standing," Izanami said, surprising him with sudden appearance. He hadn't heard her enter, which was unusual considering he could hear her heart loud and clear, a constant beat in time with the throbbing in his throat. She set the box down on the bed, its lid removed, and shifted through its replenished contents, taking from it a thin white tube. "Your injury is healing nicely. What's it been? Eleven days? Twelve?" she asked him, squeezing from the tube a thick white cream onto the jagged lines on his chest, spreading it with her fingers over the stitches and pale pink—nearly white—tissue.

"Twelve…I believe it is," Takuma answered, counting in his head the days he was unconscious and the days he remembered. She hummed in acknowledgement, wiping the excess off on her right pant leg before resealing the tube and switching out the roll of bandages.

"Hold this end," she instructed him, pressing the end of the roll against his right pectoral and wrapping it around his back and chest repeatedly until the end was secure and his wound was covered. "How are you feeling?" she asked him while tying off the end of the bandage, wanting to know if he was felling well enough to work a little.

Takuma thought this over for a bit, flexing his back and putting a hand on his chest, prodding it a bit and wincing slightly at the small tug of the threads holding his flesh together. "Much better than the day before," he answered her, purposefully ignoring the burn in his throat as he put on a smile. He believed he could put up with this much for the day, later on he would ingest a blood tablet, but for now I he would see how far he could go.

She reciprocated his smile, something he took note of to be unusual, and extracted from the back pocket of her jeans a small pair of pruning shears, holding it out for him to take. When he took it, hesitantly, he looked to her for some explanation, the smile on his lips dropping a few degrees as he tilted his head. It was a cute gesture she lamented, once that reminded her slightly of a confused puppy.

"I need to tend to my garden today and I have a small job for you to do," she explained, turning on her heel and walking out of the room, expecting him to follow her.

"Something that involves pruning shears?" he asked her, following dutifully after grabbing his borrowed button-up and slipping it on as he walked.

"I'll show you what to do once you see it," she told him cryptically, walking through the kitchen and bursting through the back door, leaving it to slam back in place. Takuma hesitated for a moment before putting his hand on the doorknob and pulling it open slowly, unsure of what he would see having seen only one side of the house from the outside. A plethora of scents hit his nose: the sweet smell of Japanese honeysuckles, the dusty and slightly mushy green note of chrysanthemums, and the earthy, fresh smell of mixed vegetables.

"Not getting any younger out here, Mr. Prince. Move it or lose it!" Izanami shouted from beyond the crack in the door. Takuma snapped out of his stunned silence and opened the door the rest of the way, taking in fully what his nose had smelled earlier.

"What would I lose?" he asked her jovially, looking around at the vibrant greens of the trees and flowers and the leaves of the vegetables inside the small rectangular garden in front of him, taking delight in the warm yellow light despite his underlying instinct to shield himself from its brightness.

"An opportunity for a change of scenery," Izanami answered, turning back to him and snapping her fingers in front of his face, bringing his attention from the honeysuckle vines climbing onto a bush at the far corner of the small cabin to the young woman in front of him. "You mentioned a few days ago that your mother runs an Ikebana school. Would you happen to know which parts of a flower are poisonous?" she asked him, making him slightly nervous as to what she would be asking of him. Instead of verbally answering her, he simply nodded, slight confusion on his face. "I need around thirty honeysuckle and chrysanthemum blossoms for something I'm making, and since you seem to be rehabilitating quite well I thought that this would be simple enough job for you. You don't mind, do you?"

Takuma smiled; delighted that she trusted him to do something for her for the first time since he met her. "I'd be happy to," he replied, stepping into the bright sunlight and closing the door behind him.

"Good, put them in here and call me when you're done," Izanami said, handing him a large porcelain bowl before walking away around a corner of the house, disappearing God knows where and leaving him to look around for the chrysanthemum blossoms he had smelled earlier.

_What could she be making that requires chrysanthemums and Japanese honeysuckle as ingredients? _He wondered as he found the white and red heads of the multi-petal flower, kneeling down among the flowered bushes and long grass and placing the bowl in front of him, rolling the sleeves of his shirt up his arms and allowing the tallest of the blades of grass to brush against the bare skin of his forearms as he went about the job he was given, extracting from their thin green stems the colored, fragrant jewels that sat upon their tops.

No less than ten minutes later Izanami returned, a pail filled to the brim with water in each hand as she walked past him, the liquid inside sloshing around the edges as she did so before she poured the entirety of it among her plants, quenching the thirst they must have felt and staining the dirt around it a dark brown. The scent of water and wetted earth wafted past him as Izanami retraced her steps and repeated the process several more times. By the time she had finished her seventh round and stopped beside Takuma to check on his process, he was curious as to where she got the water. However, when he asked her she simply said to finish the task before she showed him anything.

He resigned himself to his task once again, moving on from chrysanthemums to Japanese honeysuckle, cutting the twigs they were attached to and placing each detached sprig in the bowl carefully so as not to crush the flowers facing the bottom of the bowl and the flowers beneath them with unnecessarily sudden weight. When this chore was finished he stood up from his place and stretched his back, wincing once again as the stitches in his chest pulled. _I wonder when these stitches will be removed,_ he asked himself as he stooped down and picked up the bowl of flowers and the shears, walking back inside the house and placing both items in the middle of the small round table before heading back outside to see where it was she was getting her water.

He was flustered at first, seeing her bent far over the edge of what appeared to be a well situated a fair distance from the front left corner of the small house, the curve of her rear clear as the sunlight around them. Clearing his throat several times and looking shyly away, he stayed where he was until she told him otherwise less than three seconds later.

"Enjoying the view, Mr. Prince?" she asked, her question resonating from inside the well several times before diminishing into silence. Taken aback he quickly denied the small accusation. "Fine fine, I believe you. How are holding up? Are your stitches bothering you at all?" she asked him, to which he replied with a slight fib.

"I'm doing alright. Is there something you need help with?" he asked her in turn, approaching her side and peering down the dark chasm and finding a full water bucket in her hands, a rope dangling from the handle and falling into the water far beneath it.

"Yeah, I dived in trying to save my water bucket rope since I don't have any more and I ended underestimating the amount of strength I have versus the amount I need to pull myself with or without the water inside the bucket pulling me down. And even if I were to empty the bucket I fear the loss in weight will cause me to topple over since I'm balancing myself precariously against the rim. I need you to place your hands around my waist and pull me back up," she explained to him, again her voice resonated in the well and overlapped every fifth or sixth word making Takuma temporarily befuddled before he understood what she was asking for: help.

Hesitantly he placed his hands on her waist, sliding them underneath her body and wedging them between the both on her stomach and the cold wet stone of the well before hefting her upward, taking the bucket from her hands and setting it down beside her. His other hand remained around her waist and before he could remove it she placed her hand over his and inclined her head backwards, quickly pressing her lips against his cheek before removing herself altogether and bending down, wrapping the rope around her hand and grabbing hold of the handle.

"Consider that a token of appreciation for potentially saving my life," Izanami told him, no emotion in her voice or on her face as she strode away to the back of the house, leaving Takuma there stunned, a hand held against his cheek, as if to feel it still pressed there for that short moment. While Takuma himself was no stranger to chaste kisses—both given and received—he couldn't help the small flush that colored his cheeks. Was it because it had been so long since something affectionate and sweet had happened to him? Or was it because it was Izanami, and the thought that it might have been the first time she had done something like that was somehow stimulating?

_I don't know which is worse, thinking about blood or thinking like Aidou,_ he thought to himself, upset. _Maybe I should take that tablet now rather than later, just to be safe,_ he decided, walking away from the well towards the front door of the house, and surprising himself as he found Izanami in the kitchen rather than the backyard pouring the contents of her bucket into a large metal pot on the stove and setting it to boil. Before turning away to pick through the flower heads in the porcelain bowl she had given him to fill earlier and separate them into two smaller bowls.

"Do you need some help Izanami?" he asked her, without hesitation and hoping she would accept it. His hopes were shot down however when she out right rejected it.

"Save me from falling down a well once and you assume I need so much help? Forgive me for saying so, Mr. Prince, but this is a different era where women don't need a man to most everything," she said bitterly, her brow scrunching up and her lip curling in a slight sneer.

"My apologizes, Izanami, I didn't mean anything by it. I only meant to carry my own weight now that I'm healing so well," he said quickly, hoping to backpedal over his faux pas.

"Like I said two days ago, Mr. Prince, don't overexert yourself for meaningless things. But if you really want to do something then I wouldn't say no to you getting me some carrots and celery from the garden since I neglected to earlier," she replied, shrugging off his apology before dumping the porcelain bowl's contents onto the tabletop and handing it to him, leaving him to smile delightedly at having another job to do before leaving Izanami alone in the kitchen.

* * *

Takuma was happy. He was helping her after days of doing nothing, and with today he felt like he had made some extant in gaining some small degree of her companionship. He didn't know how long he would be here, and he didn't know when he would leave, but he hoped that when he did he would at least be able to call her friend. Although at the very least he hoped to be a close acquaintance of hers if all else failed.

_I wonder why she didn't just give me two separate bowls since she's separating them anyway,_ he thought, thinking back to a little earlier while he pulled out another carrot from the dirt and brushed off the excess before placing it in the bowl with the celery he had picked earlier. _Which reminds me, what sort of meal uses those specific flowers? As far as I know they can be used to make tea when they're dried, but Izanami doesn't seem the type._

Takuma resumed his task, picking several more large looking carrots and placing them inside the bowl before taking it and standing up._ No, it's more than likely that she's planning to brew tea; it's the only thing that's explainable._ He let his mind wander, unknowing—or maybe trying to ignore—the small burn in his throat. It wasn't until it flared that he actually took notice of it, taking a hand from around the bowl to touch his throat and remark to himself that it felt as if he had swallowed scorching desert sand: dry and hot and in need of relief. Unfortunately it was at this time that the wound in his chest decided to act, sending a shockwave through his heart and bringing him to his knees, the bowl tumbling from his hand and falling to the ground, rolling no more than a foot away and spilling all of its contents.

He gasped, lowering his hand to his chest and digging his fingers into his flesh, hoping to quell the pain but succeeding only in making it worse. Temporarily he thought it was the stitches and in a fit he tore off the buttons of his shirt and the bandages encircling his upper torso to get at the tracks of black beneath. Sucking in a deep breath, he dug his nails underneath and pulled, puling at and weaving the long grass between the fingers of his other hand as he did so to have some small hold on something as he braced the pain. Blood fell in thin rivulets down his hand as his nails caught the small holes left in his chest by the stitches as he tore them out before pressing his hand over his healing wound to both staunch the blood and relieve the pain.

He might have been panicking—no, he was definitely panicking—if he were sane he would have stopped when he saw the blood drops on the blades of grass beneath him. If he weren't panicking he would have notice that the bowl had broke beneath his grasping hand. Its once smooth, rounded white exterior now jagged and rough and separated into curving shards. No, he didn't notice until his probing fingers came across a large shard and gripped it tight, slicing the flesh of his palm. No, it wasn't until thin, calloused hands grasped his, prying his fingers from the shard and extracting it from his grasp, throwing it far away from and brushing away any other shards.

"Takuma? _Takuma!_ Look at me! No, not at the ground, at me!" Izanami said, commanding his attention and lifting his head to make him look away from the blood staining the ground to the young woman kneeling in front of him. "Hey! Breathe Takuma. Deep breath in, slow breath out," she commanded him, dropping one of her hands from his face to the his hand clutching his chest, moving it away with some force to look at the battered skin beneath it. Her hand met with slick blood as she tried to move it away to inspect the torn skin where the stitches had cut into when he tore them out.

_And here I thought he was getting better,_ Izanami thought as Takuma writhed in agony and lowered his head to face the ground once again despite her orders.

"_It—it hurts,_" he said, dropping his hand to grasp at the ground, dirt digging under his nails as he clawed at it. Unbeknownst to him his eyes turned from their bright emerald green to dull glowing red, the very edges of which Izanami could see and the color of which she feared to see.

"Takuma, breathe. Listen to me, breath through the pain," she commanded him, placing her hands on top of his on the ground, pinning them to the ground. With this position on the ground, were he to lift his head they would be face to face, but Izanami didn't let this thought enter her mind as he tilted his head slightly to the side—like he was listening to something far off—and spoke in a somewhat hollow voice.

"_Everything hurts…and every time I breathe it hurts even more."_ He was either in great pain or his grip on the reality of his current situation. Either way Izanami couldn't help him while he was like this: conscious.

"I'm sorry about this, Mr. Prince," Izanami whispered to him, removing her right hand from his and bringing it back. Takuma looked up at her, his eyes glowing brighter as he watched her in question before widening in surprise as she brought her hand forwards, fingers curled into a well made fist as the knuckles of her hand brought his head sharply to the side with the contact against his cheek. He fell soon after, his body slumping into the grass beside her with a red mark on his face. His eyes lost their red hue and reverted back to their original color before closing as darkness overcame his vision and his mind slipped into blissful sleep.

Izanami sighed to herself, watching him as his breathing calmed and his blood stained his shirt a darker shade. "You need to listen when I speak, Mr. Prince. Then you'd be able to enjoy the soup I'm making," she told his unconscious body before turning to him to help him into the house. Wrapping his arm around her shoulders and wrapping her own around his back, lifting him up and letting his feet drag on the ground behind him. Blood dripped every so often onto the grass and then onto the wood as she brought him inside and laid him down on the floor of her kitchen—the farthest she could bring him physically as she had only so much strength to carry a grown man singlehandedly.

"Be glad I'm here to stop your bleeding, Mr. prince," she told him even though he wasn't listening as she rolled him onto his back and cleared away the frayed bandages and the thin, coarse string sticky with blood stuck to his pale chest before she went to get her first-aid kit. "Be glad we both were."


	6. 6: Chapter 5

He supposed he should have seen stars, or heard birds singing, or even bells ringing, but the only thing he heard was her lament that he would be unable to eat the soup she was making before darkness clouded his vision and he slipped into unconsciousness. And the only thought he made was one that he hated.

When Takuma awoke several hours later, well into the night, he felt woozy at first, and as his mind sharpened with his awakening, as did the sharp pain in his jaw and the dull ache in his chest. He groaned as he moved, rolling onto his side calming his mind as he thought to remember what had made him lose consciousness in the first place. Vaguely he took note that he was lying on wooden floorboards, and as he sharpened his senses he heard the metronomic dripping of the leaky faucet in the kitchen sink. Hidden in the undertone of the frequent splashing sound was a steady heartbeat and slow, deep breathing. From the smell of gunpowder, moss and vegetable soup he could determine that the heartbeat and breathing belonged to Izanami—although that would have been obvious seeing as this was her home, it was unusual since the sounds were much closer than he expected.

Opening his eyes to no more than a sliver he took in the sight before him—or rather the lack there of. Two pairs of table legs and a pair of sock-covered feet were all he saw, even with his ability to see through the darkness. Slowly he sat up, all too aware of his aching muscles and the somewhat numb area in his chest. Looking down he found it once more bound in bandages, and when he ran his fingers over the area where his wound was, he felt the ever so slight bumps marking where stitches once more bound him together like a torn stuffed animal.

"Izanami," he said aloud, peering over the edge of the table from his seat upon the floor, seeing the top of her head as she laid the side of her face against the woodwork. She groaned—or maybe she moaned?—before she twitched a bit, rubbing her cheek against the table. "Izanami, are you awake?" he said once more, hesitantly and quietly. She moaned this time moving her head, lifting it upright so her body and back was still bent forward but her chin was resting against the tabletop.

"I am now," she replied grumpily, evident that he had woken her in the middle of a pleasant sleep. Actually, now that he thought about it, how had he himself fallen asleep? "How are you feeling? You seemed to have hit a rough patch in the healing process," she continued, bringing a hand out from under the table to rub tiredly at her eyes before she sat up straight, stretching her back as she did so and receiving several pops and a satisfied sigh before she relaxed back in her chair.

Takuma thought back to several hours before when the "rough patch" had started and, most particularly, how it had ended.

"You hit me," he said, somewhat incredulously as he openly stared at her. She cracked a small smirk, snickering a bit at his reaction while he frowned at hers.

"You were panicking, and if you can remember I apologized before I did," she replied, leaning forward slightly from her slouch and regarding him more seriously then she had before. "Let's look at this another way, if I hadn't knocked you out you would have wrecked your body close to how I found you. The way I see it I helped you avoid greater suffering," she told him, berating him like a child as he struggled to stand up from the floor, using the table as leverage as he bent over slightly and put a hand to his still aching chest.

"Either way it still hurts," he mumbled, straightening up and regarding her wearily, as if she had gotten more aggressive in the several hours he had been unconscious. "Where's my shirt?" he asked her, as if he had only now noticed it was missing from his body.

"In a bucket of soap and water in the bathroom. You're welcome to put it on, but you might get a little cold later," was her snarky response. He looked away from her, unsure of where else to go with this conversation—or even if it was a conversation at all—and simply pulled out the chair across from her and sat shakily down, looking at the wood grain rather than at Izanami.

"Was it that bad?" he asked her quietly, vaguely remembering the bandages tearing away under his fingernails and the buttons of his borrowed shirt hiding among the long grass that made up her backyard.

She clicked her tongue before standing up, her chair scrapping against the floor. "Considering you tore out your stitches, spilled a lot of blood and required my services in way of anesthesia, it could have been worse," she answered, going to the stove and lighting a match underneath a large metal pot Takuma had seen her throwing things into several hours prior. "Although that said, it was bad regardless of how it ended. Let's have you take it a bit easier from now on, Mr. Prince," Izanami continued, moving from the stove to the cupboard, opening the small door and taking down from inside a bowl before taking a spoon from the drawer beneath it.

Takuma didn't voice his opinion of this new arrangement, finding it best to go along with whatever Izanami told him when it came to healing him or helping her. That didn't, however, help the fact that inside he was upset, at both himself for being unable to heal correctly, and at having to stay put more than he had been. No, he was not happy one bit that he would be restricted to doing no more than moving about the house.

Izanami noticed his distress, however slight it was, before she turned away to retrieve a ladle and dip it into the lukewarm soup bubbling on the stove, transporting its contents to the bowl in her hand. It wasn't very noticeable his distress, had it been someone much less perceptive they might have missed the twinge in his forehead as his eyebrows drew closer together, the small twitch in his already frowning mouth as it curved downward further, and the ever so slight dimming of his usually bright emerald green. "No need to pout Mr. Prince, there'll be plenty more time for exercise after you heal properly," she reassure him, setting the ladle aside and turning back, smiling a bit at his pitiful expression as she set the filled bowl in front of him on the table.

"Eat. You missed dinner so you must be starving."

Takuma stared at it for a moment, making a mental note to take his blood tablet immediately afterward to stave his other hunger, before taking the metal spoon and lifting its contents to his mouth, swallowing it without tasting it. As far as his appetite went he wasn't that hungry, but he had a feeling that if he didn't, Izanami might force it down his throat. "It's good," he told her, not really lying but not telling her the whole truth either. She smiled at the comment, happy to hear that it was good, lukewarm as it was. Although maybe he was just saying that for her benefit, either way she'd take it.

"Good to hear," she murmured, sitting back down at the table and leaning her head against her hand, watching him bemused as he continued to eat. "Why don't we have a chat, Mr. Ichijou? We have a lot to talk about," she told him, smiling cryptically and, in his opinion, menacingly. Although that may have been because of the low light on the stove beside her that made this seemingly reasonable request appear…interrogative.

"Of course," he started, wondering why she now referred to him with his family name rather than the nickname she had made up for him. "What would you like to talk about?" he asked her, masking his uncertainty that this would be a conversation that he would enjoy.

She smirked, marble eyes gleaming in the small flickers of the light from the stove before she frowned, brows pulling together in a more serious tone as she spoke. "You're odd sleeping patterns for one since that seems to be the main reason for your stunted healing. Why aren't you getting enough sleep?" she asked him, knowing full well that it was because of his late bed times and her late morning wake-up calls, yet she couldn't resist the opportunity to see what excuse he would come up.

"…I've been having some trouble getting to sleep lately. Maybe that's the cause?" he asked her tentatively, hoping with all his might that lack of sleep was the case and not his increasing urgent need for fresh blood. She contemplated this for a moment, taking into account the pair of red eyes that had shown at her without their master's consent, and deciding to give him the benefit of the doubt despite knowing he needed nourishment to help heal his wound.

No, she'd wait and see how far he could take himself before he finally fell and succumbed to his inner-most urge.

"If that's the case then I suggest going back to sleep as soon as you're finished," Izanami told him, standing up from her seat once more, raising her arms far above her head and stretching her back, yawning widely and sighing contentedly once again as more pops were heard. "I'll let you sleep as long as you want today, Mr. Prince, and because of the "little" incident you're confined to the house. Hope you don't get too much cabin fever being cooped up," she advised, turning the light on the burner off and lifting the heavy pot off the stove, nudging open the door to the fridge with her hip and settling the weighty thing on the bottom shelf, its liquid contents sloshing against the metal sides as it settled.

"Good night, Mr. Prince," she said as she departed down the hallway towards the mystery door, another yawn catching the end of her sentence, emphasizing her exhaustion at having stayed up most of the night to make sure he didn't die on her before succumbing to her own body's basic need.

"…Thank you for helping me, Izanami," he said to her, the beginning of a farewell dancing atop the tip of his tongue before it was trampled by something that needed to be said. He was watching her back as he thanked her, turning in his seat until he was sitting sideways in his chair, his hands neatly folded in his lap as he continued to watch her stop in her tracks and turn back, a slightly perplexed expression on her face. Takuma studied her face for some time, silent as he took in this new expression he had never seen on her before and delighting in the new discovery, wondering what other expressions he might find on her during his stay. He cracked a small smile at the idea and instantly her confusion melted away into mild annoyance.

"I'm just protecting my investment. Not to mention you're a good guinea pig to use if I ever want a pet," she replied, turning her back on him and disappearing behind the door. Her footsteps tromping down the stairs were the last he heard of her after that, but his smile only ever increased after her departure. And decreased when the oh-so familiar burn in his throat came back, bringing to mind his need food. Not this pleasant concoction Izanami had made, but rather the pleasurable liquid flowing through her and keeping her alive.

No, he could make do with this much; he wouldn't jeopardize the small companionship they shared.

He listened hard for any sound, wanting to make sure that she didn't surprise him by a sudden arrival before reaching into his pants pocket and taking out the near-empty pack of blood tablets, sliding it open and dreading that there was one left, half a regular dose then he should have had. Dismayed, he took the tablet out and set it in the palm of his hand, wondering if it would be better to let it dissolve into water, diluted to a certain degree that it couldn't help any more than having two at his disposal since they would be gone eventually.

He sighed to himself before dropping it into the small box and placing it back in his pocket, certain that although Izanami might forbid it, he would have to leave and find the nearest supplier.

_That's the more favorable option, but Izanami watches me like a hawk. I'll probably have to leave when she goes hunting. She won't like it, but it's better that she's angry rather than dead,_ he thought, absentmindedly stirring the remaining liquid in his bowl, every once in a while filling his spoon with the contents and bringing it up to his mouth, letting the hot, salted broth run down his throat and pool warmly in his stomach.

Yes, it is better that he leaves before the broth in his stomach is replaced by warm blood.

* * *

Takuma was conflicted, as he seemed to be most of the time these days. Soon after Izanami left for bed, he finished his meal, washed his dish, and did the same. And now here he lay, in his bed, staring up at the ceiling with his hands folded neatly on his bare stomach, wondering how he would spend the next several hours. He thought about reading to quell his boredom but quickly remembered that the few books she had given him he had finished. He wondered if he could roam the area around her home without her finding out but decided against, unwilling to risk her anger.

What options did he have left then besides making designs in the ceiling and forcing himself to sleep?

* * *

In retrospect this may have been a flawed plan, and somewhat suicidal. What could he have been thinking when he sat up in bed and placed his feet upon the floor, when he crossed the floor and opened the door, and especially now as he stood in front of the door leading to the outside world. If he could put it into words, he'd say this was forbidden. Given of course that she had explicitly ordered him not to.

But she was right, he was getting cabin fever being restricted to this house all day for the last two weeks, and after having a mere taste of fresh air and afternoon light he wanted more, even if he didn't like going against his savior's wishes.

His hand reached out, brushing the knob timidly before grasping it in a firmer hold and opening the door. The cool night flowed in quickly afterward, rushing to great him and caress his skin like a lover as he stepped out into the night. He had no idea what time it was, and he had no idea how long it was until sunrise, all he knew was that he was going to enjoy himself until the first rays of light shown over the hills and mist.

With his first step outside his bare foot met with wet, spongy grass, his weight flattening it as he took another step, and then another and then another until he breached the encircling row of trees and continued on. His one and only plan to walk until his lungs were full of fresh air and his legs begged for rest. Then and only then would he return to the house and carry out the rest of his house arrest.

Around him were sounds one might hear only at night, when light-worshipping creatures retired to their beds and the night-lover—such as himself—came out. Owl screeches as they searched and hunted for prey and mice scurrying under fallen leaves or through thorny bushes as they tried to avoid their vicious claws. Chirps from crickets, yips from foxes, the rustle of leaves as the wind ran through the trees, when was the last time he had heard something to natural and peaceful?

And so he strayed, doubling back every once in a while so he didn't get too lost, but eventually he just stopped caring. If he went back his blood lust would take over. If he went back he ran the risk of hurting Izanami. She might say that she could take care of herself, and she might be deadly to everything she hunted, but he doubted she could protect herself from a ravenous vampire.

If only he knew that he was one of the things she hunted.

* * *

Daybreak rose without his realizing, its honey golden rays streaming through the mist and turning the white-speckled obsidian sky into a solid blanket of blue, not a cloud in the sky to obstruct the now irritating sunlight. The trees helped some to lessen the pain the light dealt his eyes, but it didn't take it away. When did he get so lost? How far away from the cabin was he? How long had he been out here?

These questions raced through his mind as he tried to remember how long he walked one way and how long he walked another. He stopped, trying to regain his bearings as he focused on his sense, most specifically his nose. Each time the wind blew, he turned his nose to the scents that followed, searching for the scents that he equated to Izanami. Gunpowder, soup, cooked meat…

Blood.

As soon as he realized that he had become lost he focused his energy on his heightened sense of smell, and that had been his undoing, for as soon as he caught the bitter scent of Izanami's blood, his head snapped in its direction, and his body started running without his consent, before he could think or even muster up the word 'no'. His body knew what his mind was denying him: food. He hated to admit it, but right now Izanami was food.

* * *

Izanami was no fool. Before her head even hit the pillow, hell, even before her foot made contact with the first step of the wooden staircase, she knew Takuma would not go to bed. No, he was more than likely to stay up reading, in fact, that had been her bet. And then she thought, she thought about how long he'd been cooped up in the house, and how when her Father had come by on his biweekly visit, he was standing just outside the door. At most she had thought he would walk around a bit, survey the area and breathe in the night air, maybe even delve a few feet into the surrounding forest. This was out of her calculations.

Had he been stricken with momentary insanity? Did he not understand that he was still injured and had been strictly advised not to strain himself?

_That moron, the isolation must have gotten to him,_ Izanami thought as she balled her hands into fists and stared narrowly into the forest. When she had woken several hours later than normal she had expected him to be where he should have been: in bed. But all she had found were an empty bed with strewn covers, and when she suspected him to be outside, he was nowhere to be found.

Now, she could have chalked up his sudden disappearance as him leaving to continue his healing elsewhere, but he wasn't that type, at the very least he would have told her of his intentions before leaving. So it was more than likely that he had gotten lost.

_Desperate times call for desperate measures,_ she thought dryly, lip curling at the thought of what she was about to do. She turned her back on the trees and stalked back into the house, tromping downstairs quickly to collect her one of her .22s before climbing the steps two at a time to retrieve a knife from the kitchen. _He's a vampire so he should be quick, but he's also injured, not to mention I don't know how far away he is. Well, if I assume he's been gone since I fell asleep, then he should be quite a distance away. Two minutes then,_ she calculated, leaving the door open behind her as she stomped back outside, stopping halfway between the tree line and her home.

She slid the gun into the holster at her side, deciding the better method to get Takuma back as quickly as possible would be to play on his starving senses, even though it was possibly suicidal given that she still had no idea how far away he was, or even which direction he had gone. Pulling back the sleeve of her jacket, she brought the knife to her left inner forearm, she placed the edge against the area below her elbow and pressed down, slicing the flesh easily and eliciting a hiss as red liquid rose to coat the blade and hide the cut before dripping down her forearm, red streaks marring the flesh. Her jaw tight, she removed the blade and threw it away into the underbrush lining the house before raising her arm horizontally beside her, waiting patiently as the blood dripped onto the grass below it and the wind blew its metallic scent to God knows where. It was a shallow cut, only deep enough to bring out enough blood to attract the young vampire, but Izanami knew better than to let it continue to drip, so she waited less than thirty seconds before bringing her arm against her stomach and pulling the sleeve of her jacket back over her arm in an attempt to staunch the blood flow as she simultaneously pressed the thumb of her right hand against the axillary artery in her upper arm.

For a minute she waited, listening careful in the silence for footsteps, rustling, anything that sounded like a grown man walking through the woods. When it got close to the two minutes she allotted him, she removed her hand and grabbed her gun, cocking back the hammer as she raised it to the sky, firing off a few rounds before waiting thirty seconds and firing off again. When she cocked the gun to fire off a third set of rounds, she stopped, listening as the sound of hurried footsteps drew near on her left side. She dropped her arm, letting it sit by her side with the gun still cocked and ready to fire as she waited for the person running towards her to show themselves.

She wasn't disappointed when it was the familiar blond who breached the line of trees, his hand grasping his chest tightly making the bandages fray and break under his grip as he panted heavily. His eyes glowed bright red as he fell to his knees, a starving look etched into them along with something Izanami could only identify as inner-conflict.

_I wonder how long it'll be before I can no longer describe him as "non-lethal",_ she asked herself as she raised her gun once again and fired off the round left in the barrel, just to get him to snap out of it. He blinked hard, once, twice, and the red hue coloring his eyes faded away to the bright green they normally were, the bright green Izanami would never admit she liked.

"What were you doing, sleep walking?" she asked nonchalantly as she put the gun away, approaching him like she wound anyone else despite the danger he possessed several moments earlier. He didn't answer; all he did was stare at her before lowering his eyes to the ground, a sort of hurt expression on his face, like he had done something wrong. Or rather, that he had been about to do something he would have regretted.

"Hey," she squatted down in front of him, intentionally getting close to see how he would react to her blood once he had regained some control, "go take a bath and get some sleep, you look as bad as you smell." Izanami was not one to be subtle, and her humor was often dry in Takuma's opinion, and yet he couldn't help but chuckle, his body shaking with laughter.

"I'm hungry," he laughed, smiling up at her with a happier expression than the one he had displayed before. She reciprocated his smile, something that he admittedly found unnerving given her near permanent smirk and toothy, mocking grin.

"Wipe yourself down with a rag, and I'll make us some lunch," she bargained, standing up and holding out her hand for him to take. Hesitantly he took it, using her strength to help him stand and refraining from letting go as his body shook under his own weight. Briefly he glanced up at Izanami, seeing her eyebrow raised in curiosity and a frown on her face. Quickly to dispel whatever she was feeling—since he couldn't accurately describe the look on her face as worry—he slapped a smile in place and said reassuringly,

"Sorry, I'm just a little tired."

Her frown turned up at one of the corners, a small smirk on her lips as she turned back around and pulled him with her towards the house. "You've been out all night, of course you would be," she replied, her hand tight around his as he lagged a bit. "I'll make something quick to eat, so do whatever you need to do in the bathroom," she instructed him, letting go of his arm and pushing him towards the bathroom before shutting the door behind them. He nodded his agreement, shuffling towards the bathroom and stopping only to grab a shirt a pair of pants from his room while Izanami headed to the kitchen to tie a towel around her arm to staunch the blood before it leaked through her clothes.

His mind in a stupor, Takuma wetted a rag with cold water and pressed it to his face, trying to cool himself down and regain his head after his near attempted murder. Would it have been murder? Would he have been able to stop as soon as the rich blood touched his tongue? For some reason or another he felt the need to test himself. Or maybe it was his subconscious trying to reason with him to take what he needed.

Immediately he felt disgusted with himself. He found the very idea of stealing blood from under her nose appalling to him. It disgusted him even more when, as he took the rag from his face and looked in the mirror covering the door of the medicine cabinet, he saw red eyes staring back. Grimacing, he took the small handle on the side of the door and opened the cabinet, turning the mirror towards the wall opposite the bathroom door. He sighed, not even bothering to try and turn his eye color back as he wetted the rag again and placed it on the back of his neck, letting his head loll forward as he leaned his weight against the sink, and thought over what he was going to do before ultimately deciding.

It didn't matter that he didn't want to leech off Izanami more than he was already. It didn't matter that he knew he shouldn't. All that mattered was getting himself under control even though it meant giving in.

One last time he decided to take his blood tablet, putting off feeding for another day so he could get a good plan in place. And as he reached into his pocket to take the small box out, he couldn't help but glance at the interior of the cabinet in front of him, more importantly at the small bottle atop the shelf.

* * *

He left the bathroom soon after freshening up, the small bottle in his pocket and his eyes turned back to their natural shade of green. Absent from his face however was his usual cheerful smile, in its place was a smaller, tighter one the conveyed his true feelings about his ruse, but one that, no matter how Izanami looked at it, confused her greatly.

_Maybe he doesn't like rice gruel?_ She thought, watching him stir the contents in the bowl with his spoon absentmindedly, his free hand clenched tightly. "Do you not like it? It's the only thing I could make in ten minutes," she asked him, bringing her own spoon up to her mouth and swallowing the smooth substance.

His eyes flicked up to hers, wide eyed and surprised at the sound of her voice. "Oh, no I like it. I'm just lost in thought is all," he told her quickly, ending on a murmur as he swallowed another spoonful.

"About what?"

"Hm?" he asked distractedly.

"What were you thinking about?" she asked him again, scrapping the bottom of her bowl to get the last remnants of her food.

"…Just how long I'll sleep for," he answered her dutifully, stirring the contents once again before adding, "And if I'll be able to eat whatever you're making."

She frowned, standing up and taking her bowl with her to the sink. "Don't think too hard, it's just last night's soup. And I doubt you'll be awake to eat it," she told him, dropping the bowl into the dish water and stalling for a moment when her arm throbbed, reminding her of the knife she had thrown away. "I'll be right back, don't fall asleep at the table," she told him, catching him place his hand over his mouth in a large yawn.

_I could say the same for you,_ he thought, waiting for the door to close behind her before jumping from his seat and striding quickly towards her refrigerator, opening the door and removing the lid from the large metal pot on the bottom shelf. He took from his pocket the small bottle of sleeping pills he had stolen from the medicine cabinet, pouring a few of the tablets into the liquid and stirring them so they'd dissolve in the chilled mixture—at least, he hoped they would, after all, this plan was nothing more than a gamble. One wrong move and someone might get hurt. He set the lid back on top of the pot and closed the door, sitting back down at the table just in time for Izanami to walk back inside with a knife tucked against her side.

Some part of him hoped his plan would work, that he would finally be able to replenish his strength, his senses, and his regenerative ability. Another part begged to differ, it hoped that he would fail, that Izanami would think the soup had spoiled, or that he put in too low a dosage, or even that he slept through supper and afterward.

"Hey, you know what that sound is?" Izanami asked him, her voice taking him by surprise yet again, her hand sliding onto his shoulder as she bent down to his level and looked around the kitchen. The knife she had brought in with her was gone, probably in the sink, but the smell of bitter blood clung to her stubbornly, and unknowingly to her she had just decided for him what route to take. "It's the sound of absolute silence. If I were you I'd take advantage of this rare opportunity," she told him, removing her hand from his shoulder to place it atop his head, ruffling his light blond hair as she did so before walking over to the kitchen sink, leaving him to do as he pleased in terms of bed rest.

"I will," he agreed while pushing away from the table, the chair skidding against the floor as he stood up and headed to bed, his decision made once and for all.


	7. 7: Chapter 6

He must have been insane. This thought went through his head more and more as he stood outside her door. More specifically, the door he was forbidden to open barring his passage to the room he was prohibited from seeing. If he hadn't seen the emptied bowl and the dropped level of liquid in the cold, steel pot, he wouldn't have even dared to lay a finger on the door handle. He let his hand drop from the handle several times out of uncertainty before laying a definitive hand on the brass knob, gripping it tightly and turning it.

It was no surprise to him that he would find a single wooden staircase leading to the basement since he had heard her footsteps tromping down them many times. The smell of gunpowder and metal hit his nose as he took the first step into banned territory, and the first thing he saw when he got to the bottom was the rack upon rack and shelf upon shelf of various guns and ammo. In the back of his mind he made a note to ask her where she got them all—though of course he would only ask her if he was ever caught. Cautiously he tiptoed on the dirt floor, looking around out of necessity and curiosity as he searched for Izanami.

He made another note as he noticed the bookshelf stuffed to the edges with books of varying sizes—the only spare room on it being the six or so inches her radio took up—and a few photographs he couldn't very well identify, he would have to ask her for more reading material tomorrow. Upon hearing light snoring to his right, he ignored the bookshelf and turned his sights on the cot beneath the staircase where the sleeping woman he was looking for lay. He noticed, as he walked silently towards her, that she had most likely collapsed onto the cot from the way her body was positioned—stomach pressed against the canvas and arms and legs spread out haphazardly—and how she was still in the clothes she had worn earlier in the day; proof of her forced exhaustion.

Contrary to her usually serious—and somewhat eerie—demeanor, the face she held now was relaxed and—dare he say—soft. For a moment he was transfixed, what with never having seen her look this peaceful, then came the clinching feeling that he had purposefully caused such an expression for his own selfish means.

"Izanami?" he said aloud quietly, wanting to gauge how unconscious she was. She stayed silent, her breathing easy despite the light snoring. "Izanami, are you asleep?" he asked a little louder this time, her reaction this time was tangible and immediate. Her mouth, slightly opened as she slept, pressed into a somewhat firm grimace as she turned over onto her back, her frown settling back into a peaceful expression as she stilled.

Takuma breathed a quiet sigh of relief, running his eyes quickly over her body and letting his nose take control for the moment to locate the source of blood he had smelled earlier that evening. When he located it on her left arm beneath a large cloth bandage, he took her forearm carefully in hand and untied the slightly soiled material before the fabric stuck stubbornly to her skin. Watching her face, he gently eased the fabric from her wound and laid it beside her, taking note that the wound was a shallow one and one that would need to be opened a bit more if he wanted to feed freely and without trouble. Unfortunately this was the part of the plan that would risk his identity.

The sleeping pills he could explain, being found drinking blood from her arm he could not.

_Sorry about this, Izanami. I'll try to take as little as necessary and make it as painless as possible, _he apologized as he slipped a small knife from his sleeve, the thin blade nearly invisible in the pure darkness as he pressed it against the equally thin wound on her outstretched arm. He made the slit quick and smooth, not wanting to awaken her with prolonged pain. The sharp metallic smell of blood filled his nostrils, igniting the burn in his throat once more; hopefully this one feeding would be enough to tide over his thirst for the remainder of his time here.

He set the knife down beside him, waiting a bit impatiently for the blood from the shallow cut to well up into the crevice he made. He placed his hands above and below the thin blood trail, his mouth close to her bitter blood as he swallowed a shuddering breath. "As little…as necessary…" he said aloud quietly, reminding himself of his self-imposed promise. From between his lips his tongue slithered out, pink and slippery and eager for nourishment as the very tip of it touched the red liquid.

Bitter, like always, but not at all unwelcome as he let the flavors play on his taste buds before swiping the flat of his tongue along her arm again. And again. And again and again and again and again and again. And then one more time before his fangs elongated without his consent and scraped against the skin of her inner arm. _Should I or shouldn't I?_ He wondered, taking a break from licking at her blood to run his tongue over his teeth, the very tip scraping against the flat muscle. _No, I've had more than enough,_ he reasoned, tying the bandage tight around her arm before slipping the knife into his pocket and standing, turning away from her as he aimed to go back upstairs before getting distracted by her bookshelf.

Behind him marble eyes fluttered, dull and hazy as she treaded the pool known as consciousness and spotted the green-eyed man standing relatively still as he perused the bookshelf for a story he hoped she wouldn't notice.

"…Tak…ma…What…doing down…here…?" she asked slowly, voice thick with sleep and not at all competent as she danced the line between reality and dreamland. In her eyes his body blurred continuously, so much so that when he turned in moderate surprise at the sound of her sleep-addled voice she couldn't tell.

"I'm sorry; I was looking for another book to read. I didn't mean to disturb you," Takuma apologized; silently worried if she was awake when he fed. At the sound of his voice Izanami's face pinched together, as if she were hearing something unpleasant, before she rolled on her makeshift bed, her back to him as she fought sleep a few more seconds.

"Jus'…take one an' go…talk in morning," she murmured as Takuma smiled, bemused by how her characteristic answer was said in such an uncharacteristic way. Takuma did as he was told, taking from the bookshelf a particularly thick novel and tucking it under his arm, casting one last side-long glance at the light-haired brunette curled up on her cot before he walked quietly up the stairs, leaving her and her "mystery" of a room. He wasn't sure why it was that he wasn't allowed to go inside, and neither did he dwell on it. No, all he did as he closed the door on her basement/bedroom, the bitter taste of her blood still on his lips, was comment to himself that she had been cut off from humanity too long if the copious amounts of murder mysteries and lovelorn romance novels were anything to go by.

* * *

"So despite my frequent warnings, you decide arbitrarily to intrude anyway and wake me up in the middle of the night?"

"I couldn't sleep anymore and I thought it unwise to go for a walk outside again," Takuma replied, wincing as the bandage being unwound from his body caught on a patch of dried blood, sticking to the skin stubbornly until it was ripped away sharply and unwound once more.

"Would it not have been better to spend the night in moderate boredom?" Izanami asked him, watching his changing expressions with cold, unblinking eyes as the last of the wrap was pulled from his body. "At the very least you could have entertained yourself for a few hours by writing down all the ways to piss me off. You could have even divided it into subcategories."

He listened mutely, knowing full well that a berating was the lesser of the possible evils he would have had to deal with had he been caught. Knowing her she'd probably have a knife at his throat before he could even blink. "Huh, that's interesting," she murmured, her fingers hovering over the large gash on his chest, barely skimming his flesh before she turned away from him and searched through the first-aid kit, looking for the medicinal salve she usually put on.

"What's interesting?" he asked her, looking down at the wound and finding with delight that it was beginning to turn pink and fuse together through the stitches, albeit into an ugly shape.

"That I'm always right and you should listen to me more," she replied curtly, squeezing a decent amount onto her fingers and rubbing it generously onto the wound. "See what happens when you get a good night's sleep?" she asked, wiping the excess of her fingers and retrieving a medical tape and a large square patch of gauze, pressing it to the healing injury and taping it in place. "Now that you're not bleeding profusely anymore, I won't have to waste any more bandages."

He watched her for a moment as she put the supplies back inside the small metal box before he spoke. "Would that mean that I'll be leaving soon?" he asked her hesitantly, unsure whether it was because he still needed her blood or because he was starting to enjoy his time here.

She closed the lid, a strange grin lighting her face as she looked over at him amused. "Come with me for a moment," she told him, standing up from her chair and walking though the living room, waiting by the door for Takuma to button up his shirt and follow her out, leading him to the well in what one could only call her front yard. Curious, he watched her as she bent over the rim, grasping the rope strewn over the edge and pulling the bucket up from the depths.

"Hold this one-handed for more than two minutes and I'll consider thinking about letting you leave," she instructed him, handing the sloshing bucket over to him, the water inside spilling over the edge and staining his light blue button-up a dark blue. Even in two hands, the bucket wobbled and the water rippled, and no less than seventeen seconds after he removed one of his hands from the metal handle—his arm immediately struggling under the weight—did the bucket fall to the ground, the liquid disappearing into the dirt underneath his feet as he looked down disappointedly at his own weakness.

He half expected Izanami to say something curt or snarky, to berate him on thinking that he could heal so quickly even though he was doing that himself. He was so caught up in his thoughts that when Izanami laid her hand on his shoulder he jumped, surprise littering his face as he scrutinized her concerned expression. _A new expression!_ He thought, both excited and weary of why she was showing him such an expression.

"Healing is long and arduous, so don't take this personally, Mr. Prince," she told him, "Everything takes time."

"Time isn't something I have a lot of," he replied dourly, crouching down to pick up the bucket.

"Aww, when did my cute little optimist turned into a cute little pessimist?" she asked him, crouching down in front of him and pinching this face teasingly, like a grandmother to her grandson. "Try again in a few days to allow the healing to continue. If you win I'll give you a prize," she continued light-heartedly, letting go of his cheek to lay her own against her hand, watching him somewhat amused.

He didn't reply beyond giving her a small smile and raising his hand to rub at his cheek, a small red mark appearing against alabaster flesh. "What kind of prize?" he asked her, straightening out of his crouch and watching her stand up with him.

"Wait three days then ask me again after lifting the bucket," she replied curtly, taking the bucket from him and throwing it over the side of the well, the rope gliding through her fingers as if it were made of silk before she tightened her grip on the end and tied it off on a small metal stake sticking out of the stone and cement. "Anyway, it's lunchtime. So, soup? Or—"

"_No!_" he exclaimed, wanting to hide his hand for a moment longer. It would be unusual if they fell asleep in the middle of the day, especially since Izanami seemed to stay awake until a few hours after sunset. Not that he knew first hand since he always went to bed before her. "I-I mean…something heartier…maybe one of those small birds you caught the other day?" he asked, attempting to retract his earlier statement.

"…Alright. I'll get the pheasant out of the fridge downstairs," she agreed, her gangly form walking away from him as she headed towards the house. He stayed behind, looking at her back as he questioned himself on why he had not seen a refrigerator downstairs last night. She stopped in the doorway of her home and inclined her head towards him when she noticed he hadn't moved. "It must have been pretty dark for you not to see anything if the dopey expression on your face is anything to go by," she snickered, watching his expression furrow as he frowned in disdain.

"Speaking of which, how did you like my room? Since that cat is figuratively out of the bag," she asked, turning fully to face him with crossed arms and an amused smirk, her blue-green eyes narrowed. Takuma thought on this question for a moment, wondering how he should word what he saw.

"…It reflects you quite well," he came up with after a few moments silence.

"Elaborate," she commanded tersely, her expression a blank slate.

He faltered a bit, not expecting her reply. "Um…well…ah, the multitude of guns displays your…violent…side," he started, watching her wearily although her expression never changed, so he continued, "I think the mystery novels show an unexpectedly inquisitive side and the, um, _romance_ novels—"

"Show a slight case of sexual frustration? I'm eighteen years old, Mr. Prince, and I've been living here alone for three years. It's not abnormal," she interrupted, her blank face melting into one of joyful amusement at his startled face—the cause of course being her blatancy on the matter of her solitude. "But don't worry, Mr. Prince. I'm not so depraved that I would do anything to you in your sleep," she finished with a smile. "Anyway, stand there all day if you want, Mr. Prince. If you need me I'll be eating lunch. Join me when your face cools down," she continued, turning away from him with a genuine smile towards his fairly obvious discomfort.

Takuma swallowed the lump in his throat and consciously tried to remove the pools of blood that colored his pale skin in a light blush. Suddenly he was all too aware of the brief moments in which he was half naked and she had, unabashed, changed his bandages. Not to mention the day she had found him and he had awoken a few days later in foreign clothing. He felt, as he slowly left the long grass of the front yard, a small sense of relief, already having trusted her not to lie to him, although it _did _make him feel at least a little bit violated—not that he had any reason to fear for his innocence of course. He was just made a bit more aware of her every move.

* * *

Takuma was nervous. Not because of the lukewarm soup set before him, but rather of the inquisitive look Izanami was giving him as she sat down with her own bowl, asking him why he was not eating. He stayed silent, staring at the yellow-brown liquid with its chunks of carrots and celery thrown in willy-nilly.

"Are you having an issue with leftovers again?" she asked him, sighing heavily as if in annoyance. Takuma's brows scrunched together, not wanting to revisit the brief talking-down-to from no less than a week ago.

"No, I'm…just not that hungry," he answered sheepishly, sure that she could see right through him.

She could, not that she'd ever tell him. "Alright, more for me then," she agreed, a little greedy as she slid his bowl towards her from across the table, leaving him with a single glass of water and a useless spoon. "So how long do you plan on staying up today?" she asked him after several spoonfuls.

"Probably in a little bit," he answered turning the glass in his hand and watching the water inside swirl. She said nothing, continuing to empty her bowl bit by bit as she paid him little attention. "Are you sure you can eat that much, Izanami?" he asked her, a blond eyebrow arching as he watched her eat.

"One can never have too much soup, Mr. Prince," she answered, unusually happy as she swiped a pink tongue along her bottom lip. "And for the last time, call me Iz. You're much too formal," she stated irritably, giving him a look he could only describe as, well, irritability.

He continued to watch her in silence, every now and then drinking from his glass and watching her carefully, unsure of when the sleeping pills would take effect. It was a low dosage, not to mention that it would have been diluted through the liquid and she was having twice her normal share. He guessed he'd have to wait and see.

"May I ask something, Izanami?" he asked her, setting down his glass.

"Of course, what's dinner without conversation?" she replied, unusually lighthearted, as if eager.

"Why do you prefer to be called "Iz" rather than "Nami"? The latter makes more…sense…" he asked, trailing off when he saw her face darken and her glare return to her eyes.

"Because I prefer the former now," she murmured, lowering her eyes to the near empty bowl set before her.

He swallowed, hesitant yet insistent. "Now? Then there was a time when you were called the former?"

"…There's always a time isn't there," she said quietly, pouring the few drops left of her bowl into the second. "I think about fifteen years ago was the time?" she mused, stirring the contents as she laid her head against her opposite hand and stared down.

_She looks a bit…drowsy. Maybe she's just a little tired_, Takuma thought as he listened intently and watched her carefully.

"My Mom used to call me that all the time, and I hardly ever answered to Izanami," she continued, bringing a few spoonfuls of broth up to her lips before letting the emptied spoon drop back down into the small pool to repeat the same process. "At least, that's what Dad says since I can't really remember from way back when," she said tiredly. It amazed Takuma how quick the effects were, despite the tampered mixture being a bit stale. Silently he wondered if Izanami would end up falling asleep at the table, but the idea disappeared quickly as she stood up abruptly, her thigh bumping against the table and causing the half full bowl to wobble and spill a bit before settling back down.

"I need to do something downstairs real quick. Take care of this for me, would you?" she said airily, making a sweeping motion with her left hand over the table and its few contents before walking—as awkwardly as her gangly form suggested—around him towards the door at the end of the hallway.

"Do you need some help going down the stairs, Izanami?" Takuma asked out of courtesy and the fear that his selfish needs would cause her to injure herself.

"How old do I look, Mr. Prince?" she asked him, stopping in the middle of the hallway and laying her hand on the wall, inclining her head very slightly in his direction.

"…Old enough not to need my help?" he asked her tentatively, certain that it was a rhetorical question.

"Damn straight, but that's not the answer. I know that you just want another peek downstairs, but I see right through you, Mr. Prince," she stated incorrectly, continuing down the hall and stopping before the door, opening it and closing it as she disappeared behind it, leaving Takuma to listen intently as she took slow deliberate steps until her feet hit the hard dirt floor; footsteps soft compared to earlier. He stood when he was certain that Izanami had not fallen down the stairs and picked up the bowls left from dinner, dumping the left over soup down the sink drain before washing the dishes.

For a moment he wondered if he should throw out the tainted soup in the fridge, and immediately argued against it, remembering quite vividly that Izanami hated wasting food. _I should throw it out anyway, just in case,_ he decided, opening the fridge and taking hold of the metal pot inside. The remaining soup sloshed about as he took it across the kitchen floor, setting it down briefly to open the back door and picking it up once again to take it far outside and dumping the poisoned liquid near the tree line. While he walked back to the small home with soup pot in hand, he discussed, in his mind, various excuses he'd use if Izanami asked him where the leftovers had gone.

* * *

The kitchen was clean, the dishes were spotless, and the ill-tempered brunette was fast asleep on a cot in her basement—the result of a doubled (yet diluted) mixture of vegetable soup and sleeping pills. Wisps of light brown hair fell across her sleeping face as her chest expanded and contracted with each breath that passed through her lips. Izanami lay on her side, her injured arm outstretched beside her while the other lay curled against her stomach, her long legs bent and thrown haphazardly. Above her knelt a tall, and extremely perplexed, blonde man, eyebrows scrunched in confusion as he stared down at her.

Having just unraveled her makeshift bandage he expected her to still have her small injury, a thin cut above the juncture of her arm beginning to scab over. But to his surprise he found a bright pink scar in its place. Silently he panicked, not having brought a knife with to reopen wound, only his thirst and his fangs.

He wondered as he stilled his breath whether or not to use his teeth to split open the skin, but that depended upon his desperation. He could go back upstairs to grab the knife, risking the amount of courage he had gathered just to walk past the doorframe. Not to mention he would be violating his personal promise of not causing her excessive bodily harm. The gentle side of him, the side who would rather risk her wrath than cause her harm, voted against either knife or fangs, wanting to take his body limit to the max until he healed and was able to leave. But he knew that, ironically, he would need to feed if he wanted heal.

"Please understand that I don't want to cause you more harm than necessary," he whispered to her unconscious self, gently grabbing her arm and ghosting his lips over the flesh. His tongue darted out, flat and wet as he located her vein, his teeth aching as his fangs elongated before sharply piercing the supple flesh and eliciting a pleasured moan from the back of his throat as her lifeblood flowed, staining his teeth and coating his tongue as he drank deeply and greedily, his eyes slipping closed in carnal delight; her blood no less equivalent than to the most delectable dark chocolate. All the while unnoticing of the pair of blue-green marble eyes silently watching him drink, unaware that these tired eyes slipped closed, allowing him to take what he needed for the time being.


	8. 8: Chapter 7

**I am sincerely sorry for the overdue update. Lack of motivation and writers' block does not make for a pretty combination. However, I will work to get past that and update this story at least once a month until my other story, **_**Cookies, Cakes, and Cigarettes**_**, is concluded. Thank you for sticking with me.**

Takuma was not vain. Or rather, looks did not matter much to him so long as he had someone who could hold a good conversation. Izanami was someone who fulfilled that role perfectly whenever they spent time together. And although he cared more for conversation, it was impossible to ignore her sickly expression and ashen skin, even harder still her incredibly irritable mood when she appeared several hours later than usual the next morning. Had it not been his fault he would have been surprised at the switch in roles and maybe even commented on it. But he knew better than that. Knew better even to ask her how she was, yet he still asked with trepidation as she staggered blearily into the kitchen.

"Are you alright?" he had asked innocently, concerned as she dropped down into a chair and let her head fall onto the table with a heavy _thump_, her eyes screwed shut against the light streaming in. She growled lightly into the wood as response and said a moment later,

"Please don't talk for a few hours." Her voice sounded weak and from what he could see of her skin, it looked very pale. He reasoned with himself that he couldn't help it, that he was starving and needed it. But seeing this strong woman look so weak was enough to shake that thought. So he found himself worrying and wondering how to help her.

The sound of a scraping chair against the floor caused Izanami to wince and after peeling open one eye she watched silently as Takuma walked over to the small doors lining the wall. After watching him go through several of the cabinets through the curtain her bangs made, she finally asked him what he was doing. He didn't respond to her inquiry, barely acknowledged her at all save for the small inclination of his blond head as he looked through the various bottles and canisters within the small spaces. Annoyed at the lack of response, she closed her eyes and turned her head to rest her cheek against the smooth surface of the table, listening as he closed and opened another door and to the slight footsteps as he approached her.

She didn't bother to raise her head when he stopped beside her, didn't even raise an eyelid when he placed a jar beside her head. "What is it?" she asked him, her mind too muddled to think of what she had in those cabinets.

"Food. You need to eat something," he said simply, patient as he sat back down in his chair.

"Not hungry," she replied.

"You still need to eat something. Just have a little," he pushed, worry coating his voice and causing Izanami to groan internally at his empathy. A single blue-green eye cracked open and eyed him for a moment, his upturned brows and anxious eyes somewhat pleasing in an unnaturally warm, fuzzy way. Wearily she pushed herself up into a sagging, seated position and looked at the glass jar and the chunky orange solid-liquid mixture inside, grimacing when she realized what it was.

"Not the apricots, I was saving them for a special occasion," she whined uncharacteristically and quite childishly.

He smiled at her, slightly delighted at the small pout she displayed. "I believe now counts as a special occasion." She glared at him a moment before begrudgingly dragging the jar towards her and unscrewing the lid.

"If that smile gets any brighter you'll end up blinding someone someday," she told him as she scooped out a slice and watched as he brightened even further. "Maybe sooner," she muttered. He chuckled as she narrowed her eyes at him, sticking the spoon in her mouth as she looked away from the obscene amount of cheerfulness. "So considering how cheerful you look, I take it you're feeling better than yesterday?" she asked him.

"I was feeling fine yesterday, too," he objected, his smile dimming down a bit for her sake as she ate.

"I wouldn't call being on edge "feeling fine"," Izanami murmured, swallowing another few spoonfuls of the slimy, gelatinous fruit. "I feel terrible. What the hell happened?" she groaned, setting aside the glass jar and spoon and laying her cheek against the cool surface of the table. Of course, Takuma knew what had happened to her, but it was impossible to tell her without either scaring her, getting shot by her, or having her think he was crazy.

"Maybe you should get some more rest," he suggested, screwing the lid back on the jar and standing up from his chair, intent on helping her to either the bed or the loveseat.

She slowly sat up and looked at him through narrowed eyes. "I've slept long enough, Mr. Prince. Why do you think you're up before me for once?"

"Regardless of how long you slept, it's important to rest if you feel this ill," he countered.

She stood abruptly, albeit shakily, and said in a very clear and firm voice, "I'm fine! It's not the first time I've been ill since coming here."

Takuma paused, unsure of what to say and how to say it so that she didn't feel offended. When he finally thought of the right words, he smiled softly at her and said, "True, but this time you're not alone." She closed her mouth, silent as she gave him a once over before rolling her eyes and walking away from him towards the back door. "Where are you going?" he asked her as she stepped out onto the unruly grass encompassing her small property.

"Care to join me outside? You could definitely use some sunlight," she replied over her shoulder as she took long strides into the golden light. "But hey, everything's a choice, so do whatever you feel like," she yelled to him as she knelt and lay down in the grass, spreading her arms wide and craning her neck towards the warm, yellow sun. Takuma stayed inside the confines of the house barely a minute before imitating her long strides and lying down beside her. "Good choice," she murmured as she closed her eyes and brought her arms closer to her body to allow for his closeness.

"It wasn't much of a choice considering how beautiful it is today," he replied happily, closing his own eyes against the blinding sunlight and delighting in the warmth touching his skin—though the warmth in his chest was growing uncomfortable each minute he lay there and after a few moments in the sun he decided to cut this endeavor short (no matter how much he was enjoying it). Though the moment he sat up he was immediately held back by a small and strong hand.

"You've been cooped up in the house for two weeks—not counting the little escapade you had two days ago—so I suggest you spend at least ten more minutes out here before heading back inside," Izanami told him, her hand clamped around his forearm while the rest of her body remained as still as stone.

He frowned to himself, worried about his healthy composition and whether or not it would start to deteriorate. The sun may not have affected him like myths and legends had led humans to believe, but he was still pretty fragile. "I'm actually feeling a bit warm, so I thought it best I go inside before it gets worse."

"Well, sunlight tends to do that. Besides, ten more minutes won't kill you and it's important for you to get plenty of vitamin D for that soft complexion of yours," she informed him. She sounded neither stern nor relaxed, she just sounded…suggestive. So much so that he didn't think twice about lying back down and closing his eyes against the harsh rays of the sun. A few more minutes wouldn't hurt…right?

Whether it was out of petty revenge or punishment Izanami was not sure. She only knew that she wasn't going to be the only one to suffer for his misguided choices. No matter how much he needed it and no matter how quickly he healed, she wouldn't let it go. Or more accurately, she wouldn't let _him_ go before the allotted time was up.

_It's a little insulting that he hasn't remembered yet, but I have two weeks left so I'll make the most of it,_ she thought as she let go of his arm and folded her hands behind her head. She stared up at the pale blue sky as white wispy clouds drifted over the glaring sun (though it did nothing to alleviate Takuma's discomfort), thinking on the ramblings of her fanatic father and the fact that she was doing something similar. _Obsessive to the end just like you Old Man, _she mused as she eased her mind and closed her eyes, giving in to the fatigue that had been plaguing her body.

Beside her Takuma reopened his, eyes as green as the forest surrounding them watched as her face relaxed and her breathing evened out. For a moment he thought about taking her inside and laying her to bed, but instead he stayed beside her and took pleasure in the rare sight of her peaceful expression.

Contrary to popular belief, vampires do not turn to ash in the sun and nor does it burn them. That said however, it was annoying to their sensitive eyes and for Takuma the light seemed all too focused on his injury—like it was trying to slowly burn a hole where a hole had once been through the thin shirt he was wearing. Even after a few days, the raised, stitched skin felt all too warm to the touch. But for now he would ignore it, because Izanami had said that she had a special treat for him. And no matter how many times he asked her she would not budge. In fact, she seemed to him to be getting impatient. But he just couldn't help feeling both excited and frightened—like a child on their way to their first day of school.

"I'm not telling you anything, Mr. Prince!" Izanami growled at him as they walked through the shrubbery of the forest to a destination known only to hunter.

"But you said it's a special treat! I can't help but feel excited," he said cheerily, rushing ahead and waiting for her to catch up repeatedly. It annoyed her, but since she was still recovering from her recent bout of anemia, everything annoyed her—the blinding sunlight, the rustling leaves—but as soon as they got to the riverbed she'd feel immensely better.

"What's the point of a treat if it's not a surprise?" she replied with a sigh, combing her fingers through her hair and pushing her bangs back, only for it to flop back down over her sweaty forehead. Slung across her back was a 14 gauge shotgun, loaded and dangerous and the first thing that prompted Takuma's endless questions. The first of which was if she was taking him along hunting, to which she replied, curtly and amusingly, 'No, you're too cute and innocent for anything like that.' He couldn't exactly agree with that statement, but the negative answer sparked his interest nonetheless.

"True…Can I ask you something, Izanami?"

"Like you haven't so far?" she snapped.

He continued, ignoring her snide remark. "What's inside this bag?" he asked, gesturing to the small backpack she had strapped to him before they left. It wasn't heavy but neither was it light and the curiosity of what was inside perplexed Takuma the longer they walked.

"It's tied together with your surprise. Just be quiet and wait a little longer." He pouted but did as she said, falling in step with her as they walked over a rise, a wall of gray stone rising up beside them as they continued on their long and arduous trip.

"Hey, Mr. Prince! What happened to all your enthusiasm?!" she shouted back to him when he had fallen behind and nearly stopped, the smell of fresh water and moss filling his senses and spiking his curiosity. Her voice brought him out of it and he hurried to her side, prepared to ask her what was near here before catching himself. His senses were stronger than a human's and it was more than likely that she hadn't caught onto the scents yet. That said, he couldn't help but wonder about what they would find.

It was a few minutes later when Takuma was glad that Izanami hadn't given in to his incessant questioning since the surprise was indeed a treat.

He stood on the edge of a large space of emerald grass, gazing awestruck at the outcropping of moss-covered rock from which flowed water as clear blue as the sky above them. The water fell into a pool of water that looked to be deep. The pit set in the middle the color of a moonlit night sky before it blurred to a clear light blue with each ripple along its silky surface.

Takuma let the backpack slide off his shoulders and onto the grass as he stepped forwards, behind him Izanami cracked a smile, finding amusement in this rare moment of silence from him. She stooped down to pick up the bag as he took in the sight before him. While she removed the shotgun from her back, propped it up against a nearby tree and unzipped the backpack, she asked him, "What do you think, Mr. Prince?"

It wasn't an exaggeration to say he had been caught by surprise. Not to mention that he had been left breathless by the beauty of it all. Even so, he still managed to muster up a response. "Izanami…it's beautiful!" he exclaimed with a short burst of laughter, a wide grin on his face as his eyes flitted over every surface.

"So you like it?"

To him it was an understatement to say the least. "Izanami, words don't even begin to descri—" He stopped short when he turned around and accidently caught another surprise from her. From the backpack she had taken out a plain pair of men's shorts and thrown it at him, deftly catching it by the waistband despite his initial shock. He looked at her confused as she took out another pair of shorts and zipped the bag closed, quickly turning away when she pulled the edge of her shirt up, revealing her bare stomach.

"Wh-what are you doing?" he stammered, embarrassed.

"Changing. You should too if you don't want your clothes to get wet," she answered him plainly. While she could not see the confused expression on his face—turned away in modesty and politeness as he was—she could hear from the prolonged silence that he did not understand what she had said. "We're not just here for the scenery, Mr. Prince," she told him as she stripped out of her pants and pulled on the shorts, crouching down to stuff the items of clothing she had shed back into the back pack. She chanced a glance at the blond-haired man, finding with amusement that he was stock-still and as rigid as a board as he continued to face the craggy rock face helping to form the waterfall. "Though it is a nice bonus, isn't it?" She added, looking over her shoulder at the crystalline pool.

She sounded a bit wistful then—although it was hard to tell since her voice had been softer than usual—and he found the need to turn and see if her expression matched her tone. True to herself she kept her face even; the only emotion that appeared was the barest hint of thoughtfulness that crossed her blue-green eyes. "Why are we here, Izanami?" he asked her, ignoring the fact that she was (for all intents and purposes) half-naked, clad only in the shorts she had brought and the black sports bra she had been wearing.

"There's a pool of water two meters from where you're standing, so I'm going to guess we're going to swim."

"In just that?" he asked, a light dusting of pink coloring the upper curves of his fair cheeks as he looked back over his shoulder at her.

"Like I told you before, Mr. Prince, I have no need of modesty," she replied, stretching her arms above her head and making a show of how little she cared as she bowed her back. Takuma murmured back a small reply along the lines of "already knowing that" as he removed his shoes and approached the quavering water. "Take your time and enjoy yourself, but keep in mind that we're leaving an hour before sunset," Izanami warned him, as he dipped his toes into the cool water and grinned childishly, quickly shedding off his button-down and—after a quick look to make sure she wasn't looking—his pants and pulling on the shorts Izanami had thrown at him.

"Why before sundown, Izanami?" he asked her as he tied the draw strings on the waist band of the loose shorts.

"I'd rather not get caught out here after dark." That single sentence caught his attention and stilled his hands. He turned back to look at her and asked,

"…What do you mean?"

She chuckled lowly while gesturing towards the gun leaning against the thick trunk of a tree oozing equally thick sap. "You didn't figure out yet why I brought that? These woods have dangerous animals lurking around and most of them have better night vision than I do. You're lucky you weren't attacked the other night."

They say humans are the most dangerous animals, but if vampires hunt humans, then that would make vampires the most dangerous animals. But as it was, it was more than alarming that there was something Izanami feared. Well…maybe fear wasn't the right word. Weary was probably a better word to apply to her ever-vigilant and careful self. So if Izanami was weary of the surrounding forest, then Takuma should be too.

Izanami was quick to notice his discomfort and hurried to reassure him. "Oh, but don't let that discourage you from enjoying yourself. If they can help it animals pretty much stay away from humans." If that was true, could the same be said for vampires? Takuma let the thought slip to the back of his mind, paying it no further heed as he slowly stepped into the small pool, his feet sinking into the soft sediment and the water chilling his skin before he sleekly dove beneath the surface.

It was no less than an hour later—and no more than ten minutes into lazily floating on his back—that he noticed something strange. Not once had Izanami dunked her head underneath the water. And even beyond that she had yet to even submerge her body save for her feet as she lay upon a large, flat rock halfway sunken into the crystalline pool.

"Izanami," he called to her, swimming closer to where she lay and tapping her shin to get her attention. "Aren't you going to swim?"

"No, I'm fine just getting my feet wet," she replied, fully ignoring his presence afterwards. Nevertheless he spoke again, trying to get her into the water with him at least once—if not for the fun of it, then at least for her own health.

"Are you sure? You've been in the sun for a long time; don't you think you should cool down?"

She sighed heavily, as if he were an annoyance and sat up, her nose barely above his eyes as she looked down at him and said, with a plain, bored expression, "Vitamin D is very important. As it is I've grown too pale from staying in the house the last few days. Any longer and I'll become as pale as you." With that she fell onto her back once more and continued her sunbathing, leaving Takuma to shift awkwardly in the water as he thought of something to say in rebuttal.

"Well," he began, his brows knitting together as he concentrated on a sound argument, "too much can be bad for you too. Just do it for a little bit—"

"No! I don't swim!" she snapped at him, sitting up again and giving him a heated glare similar to the one she had given him the night he had asked her to dance.

"…Don't? Or…can't?" he asked her slowly, testing out a small theory that this was a similar situation to that night.

She flinched, narrowing her eyes to thin slits as she continued to stare down at him before she replied curtly, "Let's just say swimming wasn't another skill my father felt important in my "studies"."

He wondered what she meant by that, if she was homeschooled or—given her arsenal in the basement—trained. Now that he thought about it, why did she have an arsenal in her home? And even further, why was she living all the way out here in the middle of nowhere? He chose to leave these questions for later and digressed to the most important issue. "There are a lot of things your father restricted," he started, slowly walking towards the edge of the shallow shore before grasping the top of the boulder and pulling himself up to sit beside her. "I can teach you while I'm here. If you want of course," he hurried to say as she watched him carefully, as if he were someone to take advantage of her weakness this close to water. He wondered if he could fix this view she had of him. His mind quickly changed when a corner of her lip turned up in a small smile and a small glimmer of something warm entered her eyes.

"A dance partner and swim teacher. Well aren't you irresistible," she snickered before kicking at the water disappointedly. "I know how to float and doggy paddle. That's already halfway to becoming an expert." The alarming thing, in Takuma's mind, was that she was fully serious. But to spare her any embarrassment (not that she would have shown it anyway) he nodded a little while adding a quick suggestion that a lot of practice was also necessary. She sulked as she mulled over this before agreeing to a few small lessons on a different day.

"You don't have to…doggy paddle if you want, but standing in the shallow end should be fine, right?" he asked her as he stood, preparing to jump into the deeper section before a sharp tug on his pants kept him from doing so.

"Hang on, let me check the bandage," Izanami said as she grabbed his hand and pulled him down beside her.

"It's fine. You don't have to."

"Would you rather get an infection and die?"

After a long moment of silence she smirked and peeled off the tape sealing the edges of his bandage, eyeing the scarred tissue with all the authority of a make-shift doctor before sighing disappointedly. "Is something wrong Izanami?" he asked her, worried, hoping that the wound wasn't corrupted despite his accelerated healing.

She hummed in response, giving a noncommittal shrug as she leaned away from him and got off the rock, splashing slowly, carefully through the shallow water until her feet touched soft mud and long grass. "It's nothing a little medicine and substance won't fix," she called back to him as she picked up the backpack she had left next to her shotgun and rifled through the few things she had packed in advance. "Grass is typically softer than stone. Why don't you come over here." It wasn't much of a question, more of a suggestive command, one he followed without hesitation.

"Here, eat this," she said as she handed him a plastic wrapped sandwich before extracting a med kit.

"I'm not that hungry though."

"True, but since the medicine needs time to soak in you might as well eat while you wait," she replied in turn as she walked away from him towards the pond, looking though the small box with furrowed brows as she sat down at the edge. She glanced back at him out of the corner of her eye and beckoned with a crook of her finger for him to come over.

"Izanami…how did you find this place?" Takuma asked her as he sat down in front of her, looking back over at the tremulous waterfall before looking back and watching as she took out a small tube and applied its contents to his marred chest.

She shrugged again, focusing more on his injury than on his question. "You spend three years locked away in the middle of nowhere and you're bound to explore the limits." He wondered what she meant by that. If despite living in the middle of acres and acres of forest and free space, she was really just a prisoner. Of course, with an arsenal in her basement and a personality such as hers, it was hard to believe she was anyone's, or anything's, prisoner.

Takuma would have asked her what she meant by this—even though she probably would have sneered and asked a rhetorical question in return—but when he looked at her, he held his tongue. She had finished spreading the medicine on his wound and was now reclining on her hands, her long legs stretched out in front of her and dipping into the water while she watched the clouds float by lazily. She looked so…peaceful. So much so in fact that he wished he could see more of this rare sight. And yet…and yet while he wished he could see this relaxed side of her more often, he did not sincerely hope for it, because then it would not nearly be as special.


	9. 9: Chapter 8

To her, Takuma was a distraction. His cheerful personality was as bright as his blond hair and smiles were like poisoned sweets. They made her forget herself and give in to a side she wasn't aware of. He was, in a word, fun. She was aware that her callous and dismissive personality were very dysfunctional, a product of the neglectful childhood she had endured. But that didn't mean she was eager to explore the hidden regions of her inner personality. One might even say she was afraid. Who was she if not this cool-headed hunter? And what if that was all she was?

By herself she did not know, but with someone else, with Takuma, the hard shell was slowly being chipped away. That aside, she was still irritated—and a little amused—as he stood atop the out-cropping of rock lining the top of the waterfall, balancing on one foot as he stretched his arm out. In his hand he held a small black, rectangular box, off-key music notes and screeches of static pouring from its speaker. Shaking her head, she cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted up to him: "You're never gonna get reception up there, Mr. Prince! I've tried at least a dozen times!"

Earlier in their walk Izanami had played the radio to pass the time and drown out Takuma's incessant questions. When they had passed what Izanami called the "half-way point" the radio had given out to shaky static and stunted notes and she had to turn it off and store it in the pack. Now that the day was starting to cool down, Takuma had brought out the radio once more, thinking it would be nice to hear it play while they were there.

"Thirteenth time's the charm then!" he called down to her, leaning his body out further and continuing to baffle Izanami by not careening over the edge and headfirst into the pool below him.

"Since when has thirteen ever been lucky?" she muttered to herself as she folded her arms across her stomach and watched as he continued to wobble atop the roaring falls. Personally she couldn't care less if he got it to work, although she would admit that it would be a nice change of pace. "Get down before you hurt yourself, Mr. Prince! At that height, water feels like concrete!" she shouted at him as he nearly lost his balance and sighing a bit in relief as he righted himself.

It wasn't working any way he stretched, and the closest he'd gotten to a half-way decent reception he had nearly fallen over the edge and proven Izanami right. Deciding not to risk it any longer he got down off the rock overhang and made his way back down slowly to where Izanami stood. At first he was surprised Izanami had let him wander off given her prior reaction to his disappearance some odd nights ago. But her reaction—mainly asking him why he was up there in the first place—when he had reappeared atop the falls said it all.

"Don't feel too bad about it, Mr. Prince. The radio doesn't have that wide a receiver," she told him, comforting him as he walked through the shrubbery—having taken the long way around rather than climb the facade of rock. He pouted at her before a smile overtook the small frown, saying merrily as he held out the radio,

"I suppose we'll just have to sing ourselves then!"

Izanami gave him a sour look before snatching back her radio and throwing it back into the backpack. "I don't do duets, Mr. Prince," she told him.

"Then a solo?"

A low, irritated grumbled issued from the back of her throat as she growled at him, but still he smiled at her, unaffected by her standoffish nature. She frowned at him, disappointed that her "charm" was losing its sway over his being. "Just get dressed. We're leaving soon," she muttered, turning her back on him as she pulled her tank top back on, covering her bra and bare skin and saving Takuma from continued discomfort.

Takuma, opposed to putting on pants while the lower half of his body was still dripping wet, slid his borrowed button-up back on while Izanami went about picking up the evidence of their visit. After shouldering the pack she looked around for the shotgun before scoffing at her stupidity. She grabbed the gun from the sap-soaked tree—which she had intended to leave for only a moment before being distracted by Takuma's delighted expression—and examined it best she could. She took the shells out and peered down the barrel with what little sunlight she had to work with. _Great. If I don't get this clean before it hardens it'll be useless_, she thought, running a hand through her hair as she looked for a suitable branch filled with leaves to scrap out the sap.

While she dealt with her problem Takuma looked around once more, wanting to soak in every last aspect of this place before he left (for Izanami's home or otherwise) as he felt sure this would be his first and last trip here. His ears pricked at the sound of the crashing water and his noise felt tickled as he inhaled the fresh scents around him, his throat burning a bit when he picked up the feint waft of blood from his previous meal. As usual, Izanami's blood tasted bitter, but there was an exception to its flavor this time around, a subtle hint of sweetness that he had not picked up before (concerned as he was with his ongoing starvation). It had tasted like dark chocolate in its rawest form; bitter yet delectable. Beyond his control his mouth began to salivate at the thought and reflexively he brought a hand up to his mouth to cover it, to keep it from sinking his fangs into her lean neck.

_I am not Aidou. I am _not_ Aidou!_ He chastised himself, using every ounce of his concentration to focus on the issue at hand and leaving him open to yet another surprise, the likes of which would delight him even further and distract him from his base instinct.

On the other side of the pond and near the edge of the clearing, a narrow, hoofed leg gingerly stepped from the cover of bushes serving as its potential meal source and, before now, its place of hiding. A wet black nose pocked out from among the leaves and branches and sniffed the air a few times before the rest of its long snout edged out from its hiding place and stared at the two creatures invading her drinking hole.

Takuma stood, transfixed by the beautiful doe fixing its large black eyes on him as her ears swiveled back and forth atop her head, listening for a moment to Izanami's quiet cursing before deeming them harmless enough to be around. With equal hesitation and frailty the doe walked out of the foliage and approached the pool, still cautious of the person directly in front of her. While she bowed her head to drink the crystalline water, Takuma, quietly and eagerly so as not to upset the doe, whispered to Izanami, "Izanami. Look."

Unknowing of what Takuma had said beyond what seemed to be her name, she swiveled around on her knees, her mouth open to ask him what he was saying and why he was being so damn quit. But upon spotting the doe—who had raised its head inquiringly at her sudden movement—immediately snapped her mouth shut and stared back in silence. Unfortunately for her, while the doe seemed unconcerned by the gun raised in her hands, the same could not be said for Takuma, who, afraid for the innocent doe who had chanced upon them by accident, asked her,

"You're not going to shoot her, are you?" His concernment, Izanami noted, was touching and (to her) a bit insulting. If she wanted to shoot the damn deer she'd use a .243 rifle or 10-gauge shotgun. A 14- was all wrong and even a 16- was out of the question for her though it also would have been perfect. But this of course was beside the point; it was the principle of the thing that mattered.

Izanami scoffed at the betrayed tone he was using. As if the doe was suddenly his friend. "You really think I'd shoot Bambi's mother? What kind of person do you think I am?" she told him, as loudly as she dared if she wanted the deer to stay where it was. It was meant to be a rhetorical question, yet Takuma took it seriously and gave an equally serious answer.

"The type to shoot first and ask questions later."

She sneered and rolled her eyes at the statement. "Nice joke. It's not even loaded," she murmured, pulling the trigger a few times to demonstrate its uselessness. The clicks doing nothing to distract the doe before it finished its drink, looked at them once more and turned, trotting away along the thin stream leading away from the pool. Its white tail the last thing they say as it disappeared around a bend. Izanami grimaced at the small, sad expression that crossed Takuma's face. Evidently the deer's sudden and brief appearance hadn't been enough for him. Wishing to take his mind off it, she continued their conversation. "Besides which, I don't shoot does, only bucks." She stood up, leaving the job of scrapping out the hardened sap for latter as she shoulder the rifle.

"Any particular reason?" he asked her, reaching out to her and gently tugging on one of the backpack's straps. Izanami thought on this question for a bit while she unthreaded her arms from the straps and handed off the slightly cumbersome pack to Takuma.

"…Maybe I'm under the impression that fawns should be under the care of does, not bucks."

He knew she was alluding to the early death of her mother and the (what seemed to be harsh) childhood with her father acting as both parental figures, yet Takuma felt that there was more to this metaphor than she let on. Had he the chance, he'd have let her known of his suspicions, but when he opened his mouth to voice them she cut him off unknowingly, her eyes cast to the orange streaked sky and the darkening clouds.

"Come on. We're losing daylight and I'd rather not be stuck out here." She turned back to the way they had entered the small clearing and disappeared within its foliage. Takuma followed close behind her, not wanting to be left behind if Izanami herself was weary.

* * *

"What kind of school did you go to?"

They had been walking through the darkening forest for near an hour now in silence, Izanami's ears strained for the slightest bit of sound and her eyes darted about for the smallest movement from the thousands of hidden animals around them. She felt antsy and nervous and it was not an emotion she enjoyed. To keep her mind otherwise occupied, she had taken to identifying and counting the number of bird calls that drifted down to them from the tree tops. But even this did nothing to ease her mind, so instead she decided to delve into topics she had had yet to discuss with Takuma; namely what his school life had been like given that her own experiences were close to zero given the early age her father had taken her out of school for home-study.

Takuma was taken aback by the sudden inquiry, but nevertheless answered her. "It was a pretty…special and unusual one," he began, finding that the most accurate description if he wanted to avoid going into depth. He felt sure that Izanami, sharp as she was, would find the idea of a having a night class for gifted students ridicules.

Izanami did not question his vague and strange answer (for which he was grateful) and nodded her head, continuing on with her small inquiry. "So where there any classes you liked?" Her questions continued in this fashion: which classes he liked and disliked and which teachers were friendly and which were frightening or down-right awful and so on and so forth. Around the fourth of fifth question he had the sudden realization that rather than asking him his personal preference, she was asking him what high school life was like. His suspicions were confirmed when, after a dozen or so questions, she asked him if he had enjoyed it. He felt a pang of sadness enter his body and for a moment debated whether to lie to her and spare her any regrets she had of never having experienced it, or tell her the truth and leave her his one single view.

In the end he decided the latter and said quietly, "Yes. Very much so." She stayed silent for a long while before she nodded her head and looked back over her shoulder at him, a small smile on her face and a warm look in her blue-green eye as she replied softly,

"That's good," before she faced forward again and continued on their little worn path. "So what are your friends like?" she asked him in the same tone of voice she had used at the beginning of her questions: slightly careless yet wholly curious. Takuma smiled at the back of her head before going into detail the little quirks and personalities of the friends he had made during his stay in the Night Class before he had taken it upon himself to redeem his loyalty to his best friend.

* * *

"This Kaname person seems kind of…"

"Possessive?" Takuma supplied as Izanami looked for the correct words to describe what she had just heard.

"I would have used the words "manipulative" or "obsessive". But possessive works just fine," she reiterated, focusing more on the sinking sun and growing shadows than she was on the current topic. It would be faster if they trekked along the cliff rather than go over it, but sadly safety was an issue in both cases. Either get caught out in the dark or walk on less than three feet of space against a sharp vertical incline. Rather than risk falling off a cliff she decided on the former. Meanwhile Takuma laughed nervously at her bluntness and readjusted the backpack on his shoulders. He was sure that if Kaname had heard her, he'd have demonstrated to her a few other personality traits.

He was also curious about her slight uptake in interest given that she had offered few other words to describe the rest. Smart yet stupid womanizer, lovelorn stoic, teen beauty queen and pretty dolls. Half of them he didn't find harm in, but the "pretty dolls" comment had irked him some and when he objected to it, she had quickly retracted her statement with a small look of shock. Truly she didn't think he would react like that. So the fact that he did meant that he cared just a bit more about them.

"Did you have any girlfriends?" she asked him after a few minutes of silence in which they slowly made their way up hill; the small footpath along the cliff directly below them, looking like a beige ribbon strip between the green grass and the emerald-colored treetops.

He thought that it was probably the romance novels she had read that inspired this sort of question since until then she hadn't asked him anything of the romantic sort. Or more than likely she as curious about high school romances. So he didn't think anything of it when he said, "No, but a lot of the girls seemed to like me." Of course he didn't see the small half-smile that lit her face.

_Why wouldn't they,_ Izanami thought before catching herself, her smile turning into a grimace as she snarled at her thoughts. _I mean, sure he's sweet. He's kind. He's…_ she glanced at him over her shoulder, slightly taken aback as he met her eyes and gave her a sunny smile. She faced forward again and quickened her pace. Before she could get back to her thoughts he asked her a question this time around. Truthfully the question had been nagging at him since he had first gone down to her basement, but now more than ever seemed like the perfect time to ask her since she was being so talkative.

"Izanami…if I may ask," he began, trying to get her attention though the most she gave him to indicate that she was listening was a small tilt of her head, "why do you own so many weapons?"

The question took her a bit by surprise but nonetheless she thought on her answer and decided to mess with him a bit. "Collector, trader…pervert evader." It was a poor joke given that her style of humor was pretty cut and dry, but it managed to do its job as she heard a small snort of laughter behind her. Takuma hadn't expected such an answer from her, although from the amount and variety he'd already guessed her to be a collector to a somewhat lethal degree. But a weapons trader as well? Or was that simply part of the joke.

"Which one of those is true?"

"For all intents and purposes it's all true. The fact that it rhymes is just…" her voice slowly trailed off as she looked around the surrounding area and listened for telltale sounds. There weren't any. At least, not the sounds she was hoping for. What had taken the place of singing birds was a long, low rumble that sounded like far away thunder, but when they looked to the sky they saw very few clouds. Izanami looked back down and watched for the slightest bit of movement; narrowing her eyes to better locate the source of the noise. Only when she found the source did her eyes widen, a sharp twinge of fear entering her body.

"Takuma…when I tell you to, run back down the hill as fast as you can and onto the footpath below us." Confused by what she had said and by her careful tone of voice, he looked to where she was staring and felt himself freeze as well. Until it moved from among the shrubbery and thick tree trunks it was nothing but a large, black, shapeless mass, but as it pointed its feral snout at them—sniffing the air experimentally and curling its lip back threateningly—Takuma saw it was in fact a black bear; an angry one at that.

"What are you going to do?" he asked her, glancing quickly at the gun hanging off her shoulder before looking back at the bear as it raised itself onto its hind legs and bellowed at them. Instinctively Takuma retreated back a few steps having never encountered something like this. Never minding fact that this was an innocent creature, he did not have his katana and he could not use his powers in front of Izanami. He didn't know much about bears aside from what he had read in novels or manga which surmounted to either playing dead or making yourself look bigger. But given that they were at the bottom of an incline and Izanami had just told him to run neither seemed like an option.

"Don't worry, I'll try not to out run you, now _RUN!_" she shouted, slipping the gun from her shoulder and wrapping her hands around the muzzle. Initially she had been planning to use it much like a bat until she had a better opportunity to flee, but this plan backfired when Takuma grabbed hold of her wrist and pulled her along behind him towards the small path. Izanami was shocked, but nevertheless followed him as they whipped around the corner and sidestepped carefully—but quickly—along the thin space.

Above them the bear continues its pursuit, first running after them around the bend and trying to follow them out onto the footpath before its paw slid out from under it and nearly sent him careening over the edge, and then hanging over the edge closest to them to try and swipe at their heads. When its claws swiped too close to her head for her liking, she swung the gun at him with her one unoccupied hand. She struck its outstretched paw once but did not succeed a second time when it grabbed the gun in its massive paw and tossed it over the cliff into the treetops below them.

_It was faulty anyway,_ she thought cynically as she rushed Takuma forward quicker until they were no longer within its reach. However, continuing to the other side wasn't an option since the bear would simply get there before them. For now, waiting until it got bored and left was the only solution. Or at least it would be if it were any other bear that had chanced upon them.

"Why is it still going after us?" Takuma asked aloud after a short while, watching perplexed as the bear angrily bounced up and down on the cliff edge, sending dirt and rock and chunks of earth down on top of them.

Dodging a large clump of grass, Izanami answered him, turning his attention to a particularly defining feature. "See its left ear?" Takuma looked where she pointed and saw for the first time that the bear was missing it. "Shot it off by accident when it caught me by surprise during a hunting trip. Bastard's had it out for me ever since." While it should have been the fact that she had been caught off guard despite being highly aware of her surrounding (which Takuma assumed that she had to be given her disposition), he was more surprised by the fact that she had missed such a large target.

"How did you get away after you shot it?"

Irritated for the second time that day by his incessant questions—as well as embarrassed by her mistakes— she replied with a command, "Just shut up and keep moving, Mr. Prince. I don't want to get int—!" Izanami stopped suddenly and Takuma didn't understand why until he saw her sinking out of the corner of his eye and felt her hand tighten around his. Her foot had slipped as it got too close to the edge and the rock beneath it had crumbled away, gravity doing the rest of the work as she fell off the edge. It wasn't like it was in movies, when something disastrous or catastrophic happened and everything went into slow motion—though at first when he saw her fall his adrenaline spiked and for the whole of two seconds all he saw was her blue-green eyes, widened with shock.

Takuma's arm was nearly wrenched out of its socket as she fell, her grip on him so tight that had he been human the bones in his hand surely would have broken. And since Izanami was human he tried not to grip hers too hard—though the pain she would feel in her hand was nothing compared to that of her entire body if she fell from two hundred feet up. Takuma was pulled down to the ground, kneeling over the edge of the small footpath as he reached his other hand down to her and grabbed her flailing hand, holding it tight as he pulled her up beside him.

Izanami felt weightless the moment she felt her body buckle under her, the only thing that felt heavy was the grip Takuma had on her as she fell. Though even before then when they were running from the bear, the hand that was wrapped around hers had felt heavy and warm. It felt warm now as he grabbed her other hand and pulled her up, her shoes scrapping against the rocky face in an effort to escape her would-be demise. Her side scrapped against the edge of the rock path; its sharp edges digging painfully into her flesh through her cotton shirt until she felt his arm wrap around her ribcage and pull her the rest of the way up until she sat upon the stone ledge, her legs hanging in the air until she brought them up against her chest and curled into Takuma's tight embrace.

She neither wept at her misfortune nor laughed at the ridiculous circumstance; she simply stared out at the differing shades of green below her and listened to the rustlings of the leaves; shock ringing through her head. Above their heads the bear had disappeared, having either grown bored with getting nowhere or assumed that Izanami had fallen to her death. But that wasn't any concern of theirs at the moment.

They didn't speak for a long time—or at least it felt long to them—and all the while Takuma held her close and as far from the edge as the two feet of space would allow. He wasn't exactly sure what someone in this type of position should be doing. Consoling? Jesting? Small talk? He decided the middle of the three options; his reasons being solely lack of experience.

"Well…you're not a bucket, but do you think I can get that prize now?"

As soon as the words left his mouth he felt sure that she would glare at him and say something either offensive or insulting—her usual repertoire—but instead she burst out in laughter. Actual genuine laughter that neither belittled his question nor had an ulterior motive. He felt lucky to have heard it and overjoyed to have caused it. But both emotions evaporated when she turned around a bit in his arms, grasped his head between her hands and pulled him down a bit and pressed her lips against his. Shock was the first emotion that filled him before gooey warmth took its place, originating deep within his stomach and billowing outwards.

It didn't last long as Izanami pulled away, Takuma's fingertips brushing against her hair as she did so. He felt a twinge of embarrassment since he had raised his hand (whether intentionally or not he was not sure) to keep her there, but it quickly went away as Izanami grinned largely and stood up carefully, unwilling to take a second dive off the cliff, and said in a loud celebratory tone,

"Congratulations! Your prize is my first kiss."

Takuma stared up at her in mild shock. "That was your—" he started to say before she cut him off, not willing to dwell on unimportant issues now that their obstacle had disappeared and the sun was but a sliver on the horizon.

"The bear's gone now. Let's hurry back before another shows up again." She pulled him up to his feet and pushed him gently along the ledge, leading him towards home while Takuma continued to think about what just happened. His main thought being that she felt softer than he had imagined.


	10. 10: Chapter 9

The moon—hazy and half its full self—hung above Takuma and Izanami as they trudged back down the mountain side towards Izanami's cabin. Despite the day being so clear and sunny, the forest was exceptionally dark while above them the sky was filled with what seemed to be, according to what Takuma could see through the foliage of the trees, a billion stars. The lights they shed barely penetrated the treetops and lit the way for them—not that Takuma would have needed it of course—but it baffled him how Izanami—who had been leading the way ever since the beginning—was able to follow an invisible path. He supposed that it was instinct or a repetitive feel but nevertheless he was impressed as the edge of the clearing encasing her property came into view.

"So what do you feel like?" Izanami asked him, startling Takuma out of his thoughts. "I mean, I know you felt bubbly and all, probably terrified because of the bear, but what I mean is what do you feel like for dinner?" she explained, glancing back at him briefly over her shoulder. Having never been asked his opinion on dinner he hesitated with his response, feeling that the wrong answer would land him in ill favor with Izanami. He grinned sheepishly at her back and opened his mouth to reply when Izanami beat him to the punch. "Don't bother lying to me. I know that you're getting sick of soup—to be honest I got sick of it a couple years ago." They cleared the tree line and appeared next to her vegetable garden, the somewhat unruly mess spilling out of its predetermined space. "As you can see I'm pretty limited in ingredients so I'm sure you can understand why." She gestured loosely to the garden as she passed it by. "Hunting has its drawbacks, too, though."

"Really?"

"Well yeah, it's not a limitless supply. Plus the animals have gotten too use to me," she explained as she opened the back door to her house and ushered him inside.

"But the deer before didn't seem afraid of you," he said, finding her sentence contradictory to what had happened.

"I try to stay within a two-to-three mile radius unless I need to go out further, so that's probably the reason why," she replied as she closed the door and crossed her arms, an annoyed expression on her face as she said, "Now stop stalling and tell me what you want."

Takuma could have laughed at her stern expression, finding it cuter than how she wanted it to appear, but bit his lip to keep from doing so. Instead he gave her a small smile. "I'll be happy with anything you cook, Izanami," he answered, slipping the backpack off his shoulders and laying it on the kitchen table beside him. "Is it alright if I wash up?" he asked hesitantly, gesturing subtly to his damp hair.

"Yeah, go ahead," she said, unfolding her arms and waving her hand towards the bathroom, "Just don't forget that it runs cold. Despite it being funny, I don't want to hear another girlish shriek like last time."

"A bit of warning last time would have prevented that problem," he replied quietly, a bit embarrassed at the memory. He heard a scoff behind him as he left the kitchen and a murmur of something he couldn't quite catch. He turned back around, wanting to ask what she had said but decided against it and left her to herself for the time being. He needed to think, and while most of his thoughts were occupied by Izanami a fair amount of them had to do with what would happen afterwards. She'd made it clear he would leave when his injury was no longer an issue, and while he knew he couldn't stay here forever he knew he would most certainly miss her when the time came for him to leave. A sad smile touched his lips as he closed the bathroom door behind him, thinking back on the day they had spent together. More importantly the barrage of questions she had asked him on their way back from the waterfall and the kiss she had given him on the cliff. As he thought he bent over the side of the tub and inserted the large rubber plug into the drain before he turned the single knob on the tarnished, copper-colored spigot, the cold water spilled from it easy and furious, filling the tub's basin quickly.

He was certain the water came from an underground spring or the well out in the yard but where it emptied he wasn't sure. And as of now it wasn't an important question he needed answered; the better question was what happened when this was over.

He knew he wanted to go back and look for his friends, to see what had happened in his brief absence, but he wanted something else as well. He wanted her to leave, and he knew that—though she'd never say it—she wanted to as well. He began to wonder if maybe she would come with him and leave her forced isolation behind. To attend Cross Academy with him and experience all the things she had asked about.

But there was a problem in the form of her father, and as he thought on the complication her father presented, the smile fell from his face, becoming an uncharacteristic frown. The brief few hours Takuma had spent in his company had set him on edge and if he were honest he had felt a bit of anger and concern upon seeing the red mark on her sleeping face—though it had been quickly alleviated by the sight of a blackish-blue splotch on the man's cheek in the shape of a small fist the next morning.

Despite his absence Takuma felt he'd never let her leave. And although Izanami had a sub-par relationship with her father, she was also an adult—free to make her own choices no matter what Takuma wished for her.

"It's a nice thought though," he murmured to himself as he stripped off his borrowed clothing and absentmindedly rubbed his fingertips over the gauze and tape on his chest.

* * *

"That's rich; Mr. Prince gained some bite," Izanami murmured as she turned away from him to rifle through her foodstuffs. The supplies her father had brought the previous week had begun to dwindle faster than usual—though of course, that was due to the second body in the small house. Behind her she heard the water turn on in the bathroom, the sound of the rushing water easily slipping through the closed door. Deciding to go simple under the present circumstances she started pulling out a box of dry oatmeal and several small tubes of spices. As she checked the cupboards for her bowl of dried apple slices she came across two tightly-packed jars filled with the heads of dried flowers.

Mild surprise filled her head as she had forgotten about the blossoms Takuma had picked for her no more than two weeks ago. She'd planned it to be a treat after a previous conversation about hobbies and after learning that he was—if she were to believe him—a 'tea master'.

_If that's true then this should be a snap for him,_ she thought as she set the few things she had collected in her arms down on the table beside the backpack and got down the glass jars. After fiddling with the locks she was overcome by the perfumed scent wafting from the dead flowers. A slight smile lit her face as she breathed the chrysanthemums in. No matter what she'd always remember the scent of chrysanthemum blossoms, them of course being her mother's favorite flower. She couldn't remember the occasions when the house she had once grown up in was filled with them, or why could even recognize the smell so easily after her mother had been gone for close to fifteen years, but from the very few memories Izanami had of her she remembered smelling chrysanthemum blossoms—the scent sticking to her mother's skirts whenever Izanami had buried her small face in them when she was a child.

The smile slowly disappeared from her face as she thought back on all those years ago. She found it strange and a bit insulting that he couldn't remember. Was she so unmemorable that he couldn't place her? Or was that he had genuinely forgotten? She lowered the jar to the counter, wondering when he'd remember and if she had to trigger the memory.

"If he doesn't remember soon I'll have to," she mumbled to herself, leaving the jars where they were as she walked to the fridge and took out the pitcher of distilled water she had inside. As she closed the door, she heard a second soft _thud_ behind her. Thinking he was done with his bath, she turned around to ask him a question.

"Hey, Mr. Prince, the—" Izanami stopped short and worked to suppress a snort of laughter she'd normally have no problem letting out when she turned to face a very flustered and embarrassed—not to mention very naked—Takuma. It became a staring contest as Takuma froze like a deer in the headlights, staring back at her with a very red face despite the cold water he'd been submerged in. He'd realized when he'd run a towel through his hair that he'd forgotten to bring fresh clothes in with him and his plan to quietly sneak back to his room to retrieve more had obviously failed. His embarrassment peaked when Izanami—who looked to be both amused and conflicted—said, "…You're getting awfully comfortable."

Self-consciously Takuma clutched the towel encircling his waist tighter and stammered an explanation. "M-My apologies, it slipped my mind to bring fresh clothes with me." Another beat of silence went by doing nothing to alleviate the thick tension that rose between them, even less so what she said a few seconds later.

"Unless you plan on showing me something, you can go ahead and get dressed," she said, waving him away as she turned back around and set the pitcher on the counter top beside the stove. Takuma, grateful, rushed to his room, practically slamming the door behind him and breathing a deep sigh of relief as he stood inside the—thankfully empty—room. He set about looking for clothes; Izanami's raised, muffled voice coming through the door.

"Anyway, the flowers you picked a while ago are ready to use now."

Pulling on a loose pair of pants and slipping a slightly over-sized t-shirt over his head, he asked her, "What did you plan on using it for?" his voice hopefully raised enough so she could hear him.

"Tea—to help with your recovery. You said before you were 'tea master', so it should be pretty easy to make, right?" She answered. In his ears the two sentences sounded like an oxymoron considering that the person who needed it was the person who had to make it, but he was glad to have her ask him all the same—despite her asking in a very roundabout way. "If you have any troubles though, there should be some recipes somewhere in this book." She picked out the thick volume on herbs and the like she had stored in one of her cupboards and set out on the table beside the backpack, flipping through it briefly until she found the section she wanted.

Takuma picked up the discarded towel off the floor and opened the bedroom door, rejoining her in the kitchen/dining area and watching as she squatted down and searched through the doors below the counter space. "Izanami, you're being really…" he trailed off, unsure if the word he wanted to attribute to her was the correct one to use.

She looked at him from where she crouched on the floor, an inquisitive look on her face as she asked, "What?"

"Nice."

"It's not that unusual, is it?" She looked to be genuinely perplexed by the statement before she turned her attention back to her search. He thought he saw a slightly hurt look cross her features, but he couldn't be certain since it had lasted a fraction of a second.

"Well…no, but it's—"

"Rare?" she interrupted, sounding a bit defensive to him, "Don't forget, I'm not that…used to people," she reminded him before she straightened up and faced him, a round black tea kettle in her hands. "Don't hold it against me; it's not by choice." His brows furrowed together and a slight sadness touched his emerald green eyes as he gently took the tea kettle from her hands and gave her a weak smile.

"Your actions are nicer than your words suggest," he replied, causing Izanami to laugh abruptly, shortly. He knew it was by accident when she turned her head away and raised a hand to her face to cover her mouth. His jaw slackened in shock as he took in what he could see of her face. He could not see her blue-green eyes beneath her bangs—though even if he could their expressiveness varied on occasion—but the full smile she hid behind her hand was visible in profile. The laughter didn't last long, though the toned-down smile remained on her lips as she dropped her hand and hooked a thumb over her shoulder, gesturing to the pitcher.

"So…the water's on the counter and I trust you know how to work the stove by now," she said, taking the damp towel from his hand before edging around him as she left the kitchen, heading for the basement to retrieve a fresh set of clothes. "I won't be long."

The remainder of the evening was spent in idle silence as Izanami took her time with her bath and Takuma—sweetheart that he tried to be to his gracious doctor and host—worked to brew the chrysanthemum tea properly. While he waited for the blossoms to seep he picked through the boxes and jars Izanami had collected before, picking out slices of dried apple to appease his appetite.

Steam gently rose from the kettle's spout as the water slowly boiled, a faint aroma wafting into the air and curling around Takuma as he slowly inhaled the herbal scent. His favorite would always be rose tea, but he couldn't deny that this type smelled lovely.

"How hot is that tea?" Izanami asked suddenly. Startled out of his reverie, Takuma twisted around to watch as Izanami stepped away from where she had been leaning against the doorway, her wet hair partially hidden beneath a thin towel, the darkened ends curling against her exposed collarbone and dampening the swooping collar of her tank top.

Ignoring the dull throb in his throat, he slipped another smile on his face and turned back to the tea kettle. "Hopefully not so hot that it will scald your tongue," he replied, placing a strainer over a porcelain mug before pouring the brew for her to taste. He set the kettle down and handed the mug to her, watching with thinly masked curiosity and anticipation as she held the mug between her hands and took a long, slow sip.

"Mmm. Nice and warm," she mumbled around the lip of the cup, her eyes heavy lidded as she took another long sip. Like a puppy he waited for some form of praise or critique but his anxious expression quickly turned a bit dejected when he received none. To mask his disappointment he turned away from her and poured himself a drink. Not blind to his pouting demeanor, Izanami quietly added, "It's good, Takuma."

The sentence alone would have set a grin on his face, but having heard his name come from her lips so few times he couldn't keep from turning back around and happily exclaiming, "Thank you!" Izanami said nothing as she drank the rest of her tea and held her mug out for him to refill. As filled her cup his small problem from earlier suddenly came to mind and as he thought on it he felt the need to ask to ensure his…privacy had been taken into account.

"Izanami, when you found me…and before…you didn't see anything, right?" he asked timidly. She didn't reply beyond a simple shrug, one corner of her mouth turned up so slightly around the rim of the mug as she drank the hot liquid that it could have been either a knowing smile or slight scowl. He was leaning towards the former if recent events had proven anything. He may have been becoming more comfortable around Izanami—with the exception of his small mishap earlier—but that didn't disregard the fact that he'd probably never understand her sense of humor. He pouted a bit at the thought—wanting to understand her as much as possible before he left—and promptly hid it with his cup as the hot liquid slid smoothly down his throat, doing little to sooth the building ache.

* * *

The days continued to slip away silently, alluding Izanami to the fact that her allotted time would soon be up. But along with that simple fact—that had been weighing on her mind the last week—was the fact that he was late. "It's Tuesday, right?" she had asked Takuma just to make sure she wasn't paranoid or getting her days mixed up. Takuma looked up at her from where he knelt on the floor, his pant legs and sleeves rolled up above his knees and elbows so the edges wouldn't get wet from the water he was using to scrub the kitchen floor. As he slowly regained his former strength the level of chore Izanami pushed on him escalated as well. Currently his job was to wash the kitchen floor, but he had been distracted by Izanami's uncharacteristic fretting. He felt the need to point it out to her, but held his tongue knowing that Izanami would fiercely deny it.

"I think so. Why do you ask?" he answered, sitting back on his heels as he regarded her pacing figure.

If she had heard him she certainly did not show it as she mumbled, "He usually comes on Monday, but it's Tuesday and he isn't here. He's late." She seemed to be talking to herself rather than to the room, completely ignoring Takuma's knelt form as she passed him for the nth time, leaving wet foot prints on the dry spaces he had yet to clean each time she walked through the puddle in front of him.

Takuma quickly realized she was talking about her father and replied optimistically, "I'm sure he'll be here soon, so don't worry." She seemed to hear him this time as she slowly nodded her head and stopped her pacing, choosing instead to leave the room and watch through the living room window.

He was overdue to appear, but Izanami knew the truth, she'd known it since she first became self-aware: she was a tool for her father to use—a mere instrument in her father's quest for revenge; running surveillance for him until she could spot a weak point in the powerful vampire. With the object of his ire gone she was no longer necessary to him, and figuring she was old enough not to rely on his biweekly supplies, he had left without a word. Another part of his willful abandonment was most likely her insistence on keeping Takuma alive.

_He would have been dead twice as fast if Dad knew who he was related to,_ she thought sullenly as the yellow sun turned burnt orange behind the trees surrounding her home. It took half a day to travel from the nearest edge of the forest, and her father, like her, knew better than to walk through the forest at night, so if he wasn't here yet, then he wasn't coming at all today. Try as she might she was unable to keep her agitation from showing—her rigid posture and folded arms told Takuma that much when he peeked around the edge of the doorway.

"He might still come tomorrow, Izanami," he offered, unable to see her lip twitch into a sneer.

"Yeah…he might." She highly doubted it since, for the last three years, he'd always come on a Monday and left the following day. The only instance in which he had arrived on a different day or had stayed longer than the night was for her birthday, and that had already passed months ago. _A goodbye just once wouldn't have killed him,_ she thought as she turned away from the setting sun to look at Takuma. "So anyway, how're you, Mr. Prince? Is your wound hurting at all?" she asked, hoping for a small distraction.

"Not for the last week at least," Takuma answered dutifully, standing up as she walked away from the window.

"Let me see," she requested, stopping in front of him and waiting patiently as he undid the first few buttons of his shirt and held the fabric aside for her inspection. A few days earlier the wound had fully closed, leaving behind a few pink, raised lines of webbing over his heart—the messy black stitches gone along with the bandages and gauze. "It's doing well," she commented quietly, softly as she rubbed her index finger over the bumps. In his ear she sounded a bit sad, and for a moment he thought this was just wishful thinking until a contemplative and morose look crossed her stern, stoic features. He'd grown used to this type of look over the last few weeks (though they were few and far in between) and while they tugged at his heartstrings he hadn't quite found the nerve to ask her about it.

That said, the look she showed now seemed to have a deeper meaning beyond her deep-seated wish for social experiences. His unasked question was answered when, before he could even put together a sentence, she said, in a voice weaker than herself, "Hey…when you leave, don't forget to tell me 'goodbye', okay?" he hadn't expected such a thing to come out of her mouth, and so he hesitated longer than he should have for this type of situation but nevertheless he replied as quickly as his surprise allowed. "I promise, Izanami."

She said nothing else as she buttoned his shirt back up to the collar, her eyes darting once up to his before she let go and stepped away. "I don't have to tell what'll happen if you lie to me or trick me, right?" she asked, her expression indiscriminate as she strode to the basement door, pausing with her hand on the door knob as she waited for his acknowledgement.

"I'm well aware," he replied, "I promise I won't." Even as he said this he knew he was lying to her, seeing as how he had lied to her on several occasions and drugged her for his own health needs. It hurt him that he had had to do that in order to recover quicker, and it killed him that he would have to do so one last time before he left for good. The burn in his throat was growing stronger and while the scar on his chest was evidence to the flesh having healed, the internal damage had yet to fully recover.

Her blood—having been bitter the first time he had tasted it—had turned bittersweet during his second feeding—the surprise in taste resulting in his unfortunate lack of restraint that had resulted in her weary and lackluster state the following morning. He wondered if the slight change in taste reflected her feelings softening a bit in his presence and however hard he tried to suppress it, he couldn't help but wonder if, after their kiss last week, her blood had sweetened a bit more.


	11. 11: Chapter 10

Before now, Takuma had never contemplated ways to obtain blood. He was a stickler to the rules and had willingly ingested the blood tablets since the day they were created. Never did he think he would have to think of ways to steal it, especially from someone as careful and perceptive as Izanami. And yet he had, twice, in the same way which led him to wonder how perceptive she truly was or how much trust she had unknowingly placed in him. Either way the thought was disturbing and he wasn't even sure which was worse: betraying her trust or taking advantage of her apparent imperceptions.

And yet, despite the sick feeling he had in his stomach, he still pondered ways to take blood from her one last time before he left for good. Putting her to sleep was a viable and well-tested option but this time around she had no injuries he could leech off of. He had no explanation for a bug bite large enough or strange enough for the holes left behind by his fang—not one that wouldn't raise certain alarms anyway. And so here he sat at the kitchen table staring at the little bottle of sleeping pills, absentmindedly running his tongue over the sharp tip of his pulsing incisors as he calculated how strong the pills would be in a single cup of tea before a muffled crash came from behind the basement door, followed immediately by an equally loud curse.

Confused and alarmed by the tone she had used, Takuma stood up, quickly pocketing the small bottle before striding quickly and cautiously to the door, hesitating before rapping upon it. "Izanami…? Is everything alright?" he called cautiously, waiting for her reply before reacting with surprise.

"What're you a vampire?" she called back, filling him with fearful alarm before she continued with a near famous myth, "Need a frickin' invitation to enter? _Get down here now and help me!_" Very briefly he breathed a sigh of relief before he twisted the knob and looked down into the darkened chasm. Twice he had entered this room despite being prohibited to and, as he took the first creaking step down, he remarked that this was the first time he has been allowed to. He was certain that if he hadn't been so desperate for blood this would have excited him and sent his imagination running, but unfortunately he'd seen most of what the basement had to offer.

Be that as it may, he was still surprised to see the enormous bookcase lying flat on the floor and the table now lying beneath it completely destroyed. His heart struck an irregular staccato beat as he looked to where Izanami stood off to the side, closely examining her aggravated form as she stared down angrily at the perplexing mess set between them. "Are you alright Izanami?! What happened?" he asked her, carefully stepping over strewn books and splintered wood as he rushed over to her.

"Yeah, I'm fine. The stupid bookcase fell over," she replied crossly, lightly waving off his hands as he fretted over her, subtly sniffing for blood in case she had unknowingly injured herself.

"How did it fall over?" he asked her, as he pushed aside a part of her bangs where he thought he saw a line of blood. Below the curtain her hair provided, he saw instead a bright red scar above her left eyebrow.

She batted his hand away again as she explained what had happened a few minutes earlier. "I was trying to get something off the top shelf and the whole thing tipped over." As she spoke she crouched down beside the case and brushed aside the bits of wood surrounding it. Wedging her fingers between the dirt floor and the wood panels, she lifted one corner of it, grunting with exertion as she managed to get the case a foot off the ground before it slipped from her grasp and landed on the strewn books underneath. Takuma thought he heard a feint _pop_ of glass breaking as the case settled and shifted on the mountain of books.

"How did it tip over?" he asked her as he walked around to the other side to help her lift it.

As he bent down beside the bookcase, Izanami—a bit more hesitant than he would like to believe—explained. "It was…off center. It just tipped over." Takuma's eyebrows furrowed together in confusion as he lifted the heavy wooden frame with her, the center of his chest flaring as he strained to lift it upright.

"It seemed sturdy enough before though," he replied, alluding to the two times he had been down in the basement and the one time he had been caught perusing her library.

"Yeah well it wasn't," she stated firmly once again, clearly aggravated about the situation. In reality she had indeed been trying to grab something out of her reach on top of the case but had made the mistake of stepping on one of the bottom shelves and accidently shifting its center of gravity. Luckily before the case crushed her, she jumped off and scrambled away just in time for the case to hit the table and one of the chairs, knocking them all to the ground. Slowly they eased the case back upright and while Takuma looked around at the mess of books and split wood, Izanami patted the dirt off her hands against her pant legs.

"Are these more of those "romance" novels?" Takuma asked, squatting down to pick out a short, thick volume from the pile and trying his best not to blush at the cover art. The book was quickly ripped from his hand and as he looked up at Izanami in surprise, he saw her tuck the book behind her back, a scarlet stripe running across her nose and upper cheeks.

"Don't touch things without permission," she said sternly, narrowing her eye at him threateningly as she lowered herself to the floor and gathered up the small copies, flicking her gaze up at him now and then and giving him a scornful glare each time he returned it with an uneasy smile. "Do you mind?" Izanami asked as she stood back up, her arms laden with nearly a dozen books as she set them on the topmost shelf, hopefully out of Takuma's line of vision. He began stacking the books in neat piles and daintily extracting picture frames. There were few pictures in relation to the large number of books and most—if not all—of the glass panels had cracked upon hitting the hard-packed dirt floor. Most of the frames had snapped, leaving the pictures unprotected and extremely dog-eared.

As he slipped a photograph free of its broken frame, he glanced at the subject briefly before doing a double take at what he saw, eyeing the embracing couple with skepticism before recognizing it as what he saw. "Izanami…are these your parents?" he asked her, taking his time to thoroughly examine her father's foreign expression and nearly every detail of her mother's face.

"Yeah. What about 'em?" she asked dismissively, not pausing in her work as she crouched down to take the pile Takuma had set in front of her, glancing briefly at the picture he held between his fingers.

"Your dad looks so…" he trailed off, unable to put a word to the kind light in the man's dark eyes and the curved mouth—he'd like to say it was a smile—set on a relatively youthful face.

"Happy? Yeah, it's a weird look on him." Takuma remarked in the back of his mind that she seemed relatively blasé considering this was the only picture he'd seen so far of her father looking…joyful when he had seemed to be in a perpetual state of anger and restraint. He knew from the few things he had learned from her that her mother had died when she was young, and now that he saw the shift in her father's demeanor he understood the death to have been shocking and traumatic at the very least. He looked next towards the object of his thoughts, running his eyes over Izanami's mother's gentle face, her short brown bob and her strikingly similar blue-green marble eyes

"Your mom—" Before he could utter another word, Izanami cut him off harshly, her voice leaking venom.

"What about her?" she asked, as icy as her glare suggested as her body froze, giving off a defensive feel.

Takuma glanced up at her in mild surprise before he flit his eyes back down at the picture. "You kind of resemble her," he continued, holding the picture up in front of his eyes and comparing the two even as Izanami defrosted and turned away back to her work, questioning in a slightly cynical tone,

"…What's that supposed to mean?"

For a moment Takuma was unsure how to answer her, and found it somewhat difficult to give a single quality they both shared without tying it to another. He tried to anyway. "You both look kind…and very strong."

Takuma heard nothing else from the young woman as she continued, slowly and methodically, organizing her books upon the shelves, leaving gaps open between sets to be filled with nondescript bric-a-brac. He continued staking books for her after a few moments of silence, setting aside the picture on the chipped top of the wooden table.

"…What part of me says I'm kind?" she asked him quietly. Wide green eyes stared up at her though she tried to ignore him as she crouched down to pick up the neat stack in front of him. When the silence that followed her quiet inquisition became daunting, she felt a pinprick of some foreign, nervous feeling enter her mind. She glanced down at him out of the corner of her eye to check what he was doing—was he thinking over her question or was he ignoring her?—shocked to find that he had found another photo of her mother, one she herself hadn't seen in a long time.

"You took the time to nurse a complete stranger back to health," he finally replied, smiling warmly at the framed photo. He ran his thumb over the glass, wiping away the dust covering the large toothy grin on Izanami's small, infant face. "Most people wouldn't have done that."

Izanami, unsure how to respond to such a thing, took the photo from his hands gingerly, giving it a single glance over before positioning it between two blocks of books. "How do you know I'm not holding you hostage for my own amusement?" she asked as a means to redirect the conversation. To her, while he was strange, he wasn't a stranger at all. The knowledge that he still did not remember her played on her mind, but she decided to give him until the last picture was found before doing something about it.

"Have I grown on you that much?" He held up another stack of books for her to take before making another pile from the several that remained on the ground, gathering up the few photos that remained and letting the broken glass slip from the frame to the dirt.

"Yeah, like moss. Only you keep growing in the bright light from your own smile," she murmured mostly to herself—though Takuma heard each word clear as day and smiled regardless of the mild insult.

"Would you prefer it if I stop?"

"…Genuine smiles suit you best," she replied.

"How do you know they're not all genuine?"

"I can tell. You don't have to force it, you know. You don't have to pretend to be happy for me; there's no one here to impress, so stop trying so hard," she crouched down and took the last stack, balancing it in one hand as she placed the books in seemingly random slots. "I like you better when you're honest about yourself."

Takuma was stunned into silence by what she said. Awed that she was speaking so openly about how she felt about him—personality-wise at least. "You sound like you've fallen in love with me." He had meant it as a joke, but didn't expect it to have such a strong reaction from her. The book she held between her fingers slipped until she grasped it by the bare edge. Secretly she looked down at him out of the corner of her eye, her eyes narrowing a sliver when she saw him chuckle to himself. She felt spiteful watching him laugh at his own joke, and admittedly a little hurt. She decided then to take his "joke" one step further.

"And if I have?" she asked him quietly, her every action steady as a rock as she placed the last book on the shelf and let her hand linger before falling back to her side. The simple sentence caught his attention as he looked up at her from where he sat against his heels. He watched as she turned towards him and crouched down to his eyelevel, bringing her hand up to lightly touch the side of his face with her fingertips. "What would you say if I told you 'I love you?'" she continued, leaning ever closer to his face as he stared doe-eyed at her, flicking his bright green eyes between her heavy-lidded ones and her mouth as she spoke as smooth and sweet as honey. "What would you _do_," she asked, sliding to her knees, barely skimming his lips with hers, "if I said it…right…now?"

"…I, um…I…" She knew she had him ensnared when the only words that came out of his mouth was a nonsensical, incomplete sentence. Her blue-green eyes drilled into emerald as she smirked, her lips still a feather's touch from pressing fully against his.

"I asked you a question, I expect you to answer," she said in a teasing voice, raising her left hand to brush aside the light blond locks covering his ear. Izanami trailed her lips away from his, softly brushing them against his cheek before pressing them against his earlobe. "Don't make jokes that aren't funny, Takuma~" she whispered before pulling away and dragging her hands from his head as she sat back against her heels, smiling widely at his owlish expression. "Those "romance" novels as you put it," she said, flexing her fore and middle fingers as her grin melted into an amused smirk, "they come in handy for these types of situations. Don't you agree?"

"…You're full of surprises, Izanami," he conceded, breathing deeply through his nose and releasing it slowly as he got his heart-rate under control.

"It helps when you have someone to practice on. How did I do?"

Takuma grinned despite his feeling of unease. "Exceptionally for an amateur," he answered in a similarly playful tone, making Izanami snicker at the assessment before setting about picking up the scattered debris of the demolished chair and the legs of the table, setting them on top of the table's scratched top. He found it impressive and eerie that while she was right about not having people skills, she could play seductress on a dime and then go back to her normal, guarded attitude—though the height and thickness of the walls she had built around herself were slowly corroding away with each day.

Following her lead he picked up the bits and pieces of the wood and the thinner strips from the snapped picture frames and shards of glass until he came across a photo hidden underneath wood and dirt. Slipping it free, he brushed off the filth covering the image. A small feeling of déjà vu hit him as he looked at the visage of a little girl. In the photo she sat in a tree, wearing clothing one size too big as she stuck her tongue out impudently at the viewer, mocking him from her precarious perch amid the foliage. Takuma only had to look at her mirth-filled, livid eyes to know who it was of. "When is this from?"

She looked at the photo he held up for her to see before narrowing her eyes at him in a sidelong glance, watching him closely for any reaction. "…Around when I turned eleven." His reaction was not the right one and the hopefulness that had bloomed in her chest quickly shriveled in disappointment.

"You look really cute," he said, grinning impishly as he looked down at the photo.

_He manages to say the same thing, yet he still doesn't remember. Third strike in my book,_ Izanami grumbled in her mind as her cheeks turned a soft shade of pink despite her annoyance.

By the time the mess had been cleaned up—the unusable debris stacked in a far off corner while the table and its wooden legs sat against a wall adjacent to her rack of various guns—the sun had nearly finished its slow descent through the sky. As they walked to the top of the stairs, Izanami raised her arms above her head and stretched her back, yawning loudly as they walked through the short hallway. Deciding it was now or never, Takuma quickly offered to make dinner that night, enticing her with a hot bowl of oatmeal and raisins. She had looked skeptical and hesitated to take the offer before seceding to Takuma's displeasure. He felt conflicted, and for that he decided to lower the dosage to alleviate his guilt. If this action threatened to expose him should she wake up during his feeding, he would have to face the consequences. Silently he hoped it didn't come to that; he didn't know what he would do should Izanami see the blood-thirsty part of his lineage.

* * *

Takuma carefully crept down the basement stairs for the second time that day and tip-toed slowly so as to not wake Izanami who lay—hopefully deeply—asleep. He crouched down beside her cot, as quiet as a cat as he listened to her soft, deep breathing. Slowly he lifted his hand and delicately pushed aside her light brown bangs, freezing when her eyebrows twitched a bit. Releasing the breath he had been holding, he let a slight smile curve his lips as he lightly he ran his forefinger over her scar, gently tracing the raised line before following an invisible thread down the soft curve of her cheek.

_And if I have? What would you do if I said 'I love you'?_

She was teasing him, he knew, but still he found it…pleasing to say the least. But now that the idea had been brought up, he wasn't sure what he would do. With the Day Class girls at school it was easy to acknowledge their affection, but returning it was limited to simple smiles. With Izanami he felt that it wasn't so simple—should she have feelings for him of course. If she did…he was unsure how best to proceed. Truth be told he cared for her, he felt comfortable with her despite her disposition, and though her manner of speak was harsh, he enjoyed talking with her. Experience-wise he had none beyond flirtations and the like. He cared for her a lot, he liked her a lot, which is why it killed him all the more what he was about to do hopefully for the last time.

"…I'm sorry," he whispered, his voice nearly imperceptive as he gently cradled her left hand and held out her arm, her wrist bare to him. "I'm really sorry," he said again as he lowered his head and bit into her wrist as if it were a supple peach. The first drop of blood that touched his tongue tasted nearly sweet, a bitter aftertaste quickly following. It was an utterly unique flavor to him and he savored every drop that passed his lips. He wondered if the lack of pure bitterness that had once enveloped every cell was because of her rough exterior softening towards him. He wondered as well if the sweet taste that covered his tongue was reflective of her inner feelings towards him. Before he could delve into this thought—and before he could take a third mouthful, he was brought out of his silent reverie by something unprecedented.

"Had enough?"

Takuma's eyes widened at the sudden clear sentence before darting to the side to look at the woman he had thought asleep. Upon locking eyes with her amused, blue-green ones, Izanami took advantage of his shock by detaching her arm from his mouth and grabbing his shirt collar. Takuma yelped in surprise as she pulled herself up onto her left elbow and swung her right leg over his back. In one quick motion she moved onto his back and used the momentum to wrap her other leg around his waist and bring him down to the ground with her.

"AGH! You're heavier than you look, Mr. Prince," Izanami grunted in pain as her back hit the dirt floor and Takuma's weight threatened to crush her chest cavity. His disheveled blond hair fell in her face as he wriggled in her grasp, her arm tight but not choking as she pressed his arm against his neck, her blood staining his throat and collar while her other arm wrapped around his chest in an attempt to secure his arms against his sides as he tried to free his throat. His legs remained free but unhelpful as Izanami trapped his hips between her thighs, holding her tight against his back.

"I—Izanami—" he gasped in surprise as his mind raced to catch up with what had just happened.

"Didn't I tell you not to touch things without permission?" she asked playfully, somewhat uncharacteristic in light of the times she displayed a teasing demeanor.

"Izanami…I—" Takuma tried to explain, wracking his brain for an explanation for what she must have seen: red eyes, long, sharp fangs, more than likely him biting her arm in an attempt to drink her blood. Before he could say a single sentence, Izanami interrupted with a perplexing spiel.

"You know, personally, I bear no grudge against vampires as I believe that every species of animal on this earth is both hunter and hunted. Of course I'm including vampires and humans in the list of animal species mind you," she started, readjusting her hold on him slightly to shake his flax colored hair out of her face. "So of course it is only natural for humans to be both hunters and hunted—their predators being, of course, your species, the vampire, and vice versa. Although speaking for my people, we don't hunt you for food. That being said, although vampires have their own right to exist in the same plane as humans, I won't tolerate one who tries to drink my blood without my permission. I know you're desperate, but manners are still manners." Her voice took on an especially dark tone as she finished and as she did her hold on him tightened threateningly, making Takuma's vision spot briefly before she relaxed it enough to allow blood and oxygen to flow slightly unhindered.

"…You…You knew?" he asked, his breathing a bit rough as his heart pounded in his ears.

She scoffed. "Of course I knew. What kind of vampire hunter would I be if I couldn't spot one right in front of me?"

Takuma tried to turn his head to look at her, wanting to make sure he hadn't misheard what she had said. "You're a—!"

"I'm sorry, Takuma," she interrupted once again, her arm tightening against his throat and causing his vision to darken at the corners once again, "but since we both need our rest, I'll have to cut our talk short and leave it for the morning. Believe me, this isn't how I wanted it to turn out." Her voice became hollow in his ears as the dark room turned to a wall of solid black. "Sweet dreams," were the last words he heard before the world collapsed around him.


	12. 11: Chapter 11

**Just to clarify, if the story seems a bit sped up, it's only because I originally planned for the story to be only twelve chapters long excluding prologue and epilogue. Though depending on how motivated I am and much I want to cover the canon storyline, I may expand the story a bit. Nevertheless, please read and review the eleventh chapter.**

Two other times Takuma had felt his head swim in a pool of haziness this past month—once when he had lost consciousness after his fight against his grandfather and awoken in an unfamiliar room, and another when Izanami had knocked him out when he had been ripping out his sutures. As he woke his mind slowly caught up to him, informing him of the reason behind his latest blackout. If he had to give a reason behind what had happened, he could give several without once blaming Izanami. But at the heart of it he knew that she had lied to him.

Then again if he were to rationalize it, he had also been lying to her, and given the context it made a lot of sense why each would hide from the other.

_It still hurts though,_ he thought sullenly, swallowing thickly and wincing as his throat burned for a reason aside from bloodlust. _Where am I?_ He opened his eyes, squinting up at the bare light bulb above him.

"Finally awake?"

A soft, inquisitive voice forced his eyes to the gangly figure encased in dim lighting in front of him—her arms crossed as she leaned against the far wall. Takuma didn't know what to say, but more importantly he didn't know what to feel—should he be angry? Frustrated? For the most part he felt confused and sad that she would do such a thing to him—but the fact that he had been drinking her blood made it understandable. Though still, it didn't dismiss the fact that she had choked him until he passed out.

Whatever he felt, the resulting expression must have showed on his face as Izanami snidely commented, "What's to be upset about puppy-boy? You're not the one with a gnawed-on arm, and missing…a quart of blood? Maybe two, I was pretty woozy the other day." Takuma felt his brows knit together in confusion.

"What about the prior?"

"Prior?" Something in her tone told him that she hadn't been away of his first feeding from her. He bit the inside of his cheek, wishing he could take it back as the meaning dawned on her. Irritation filled her as she pushed away from the wall and entered the sphere of light. She was still dressed in her normal sleepwear—a dark grey tank top and shorts that made him blush—and judging by the lack of light underneath the basement door, it was still the middle of the night. Izanami folded her arms tightly across her stomach as she asked him, "How many times exactly did you poison my food, _Mr. Prince._" She spat the nickname out like it was the poison she was accusing him of feeding her.

Guilt forced him to look away from her to where he sat, rope cut across his abdomen, holding him back against the chair she had tied him to. He tried moving his hands, but found that she had bound his wrists as well. _Thorough,_ he thought before Izanami wrapped her fingers around his jaw and forced him to look back at her. "Answer the question," she said again, her voice quiet and forceful as she glared down at him.

Takuma swallowed the lump in his throat, nervous as he looked up into marble eyes. "I…when you made soup last week…I put…sleeping pills in it," he confessed, watching as Izanami narrowed her eyes to slits and her pale pink lips curl in a sneer.

"You poisoned my soup," she said slowly, her voice low and threatening, "Takuma…you've already dug your grave. Why are you building your coffin too?"

"…I…I didn't want to, but I needed it badly!" he exclaimed quickly, hoping to quell some of the harsh light she had put him in.

"Obviously," she replied deadpan, sliding her fingers from his jaw as she leaned back on her bare heels and regarded him seriously, but said nothing more.

"…I'm sorry I took your blood without permission, Izanami," he told her softly, deciding now was the best opportunity to give her an apology.

"It's okay…I'm sorry I had to put you in a choke hold and tie you to a chair," she told him sincerely, her tone otherwise soft despite the anger that had been rolling off of her in small waves earlier.

"Does that mean you'll untie me?" he ventured optimistically, his tone hopeful as she gave a quick smirk. His mouth pursed into a disappointed frown when she replied,

"Don't push your luck."

"Putting that aside for now, I'll try not to hold it against you since the truth is stranger than fiction." Finally she was getting down to the root cause of their present situation.

"You're a Hunter," he said point-blank.

She smiled down at him. "And you're a vampire—one of the highest noble breeds if I'm not mistaken." Takuma was taken aback by the amount of knowledge she knew about him—ignoring the number of questions she asked him on a daily basis.

"I'm surprised you know so much," he murmured, suspicious. It was one thing to know what he was; it was another thing entirely to know about his family.

Izanami took on an uncharacteristically sheepish expression, but her eyes were tight, guarded. "I'm…somewhat acquainted with someone who knows much—though I confess to knowing a relative of yours as well."

"My grandfather," he filled in for her, "How well did you know him?"

She let out an exasperated sigh as she reached up to rub the back of her neck, the touch of a smile that had graced her lips falling into an uncomfortable frown. "I've only met him twice," she began as she circled behind him. He looked to where she had walked off and caught her just as she reappeared from the square of space underneath the stairs where her cot sat. "And both instances were…less than favorable." Takuma's eyes lowered to the simple box she held in her hands, wondering what was inside and what she was going to do. "I heard from my acquaintance that he was a real charmer."

"Some of the adults told me he was lady-killer," Takuma said, watching her carefully as she walked back to her place in front of him.

"Yeah, don't remind me," Izanami snapped, bitter as she crouched down and sat on her haunches. What she said made him curious, and he wondered what had happened on both occurrences that made her this bitter sounding. "So," she started, opening the cover of the box and peering inside disinterestedly before glancing up at him, "I'm sure you have at least a _few_ questions for me." While Takuma tried to focus on her, he found the box and whatever it contained distracting; a cold shiver ran down his spine at the foreboding feeling, "but if you don't mind, I'd like to ask one first." From the box she took out a small hunting knife encased in dark leather, its handle metallic and the color of tarnished steel.

Izanami unsheathed it after placing the empty box on the floor beside her, the curved blade glinting threateningly in the low lighting and looking to Takuma like liquid silver despite its solid figure. She stood up, the knife cradled delicately in her hands as she held it out for him to peruse, the gesture non-threatening while the object itself brought up a sense of revulsion in the center of this chest—a strong feeling that manifested itself as the need to get away from it. "Tell me because I'm curious; what does this feel like to you?" she asked him, blue-green eyes intense as she examined his reaction to the anti-vampire weapon.

Fighting against his "flight or fight" response, he worked to analyze the feeling the blade was emitting and replied, "…It feels…unpleasant…and hostile."

"Makes sense since it was made to kill your kind." She removed the knife from in front of him and sheathed it before picking up the box and practically throwing it inside. "It doesn't feel all that great to me either," she confessed, stepping away from him. Takuma watched as she stopped in front of the book shelf and stepped on tiptoe, long arms and body stretching as she inched the box onto the topmost shelf away from view.

_So that's what she wanted yesterday,_ he thought before something occurred to him. There was no reason for an anti-vampire to make her feel like that unless she was a vampire—which she wasn't. _Is it the blade itself? Or maybe it is its purpose…_

He decided to take a shot in the dark and asked, "…You've never killed a vampire, have you?"

She fell back on her heels and stumbled before catching herself, for the moment making it seem like he had caught her off guard before she turned and glared at him. "Careful, Mr. Prince; of the two of us here, I think I've taken more lives," she informed, though she seemed to think this an unfair statement and after a quick glance to the ceiling and the back wall, reiterated, "Granted they were animals and I was starving, but they still count!" She became somewhat defensive and more childish than he'd ever seen her, like she was embarrassed by that one little fact and it puzzled him on why she was so guarded against this one small fact.

"Could you do it? If you had to?"

"Do you wanna find out?" she threatened him, though she did not attempt to retrieve the box from where she had put it, she only walked back to her place in front of him, irritated as she crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes at him—thought he noticed they held a considerably small amount of heat than they did before.

He continued to converse with her, hoping to figure out what he thought might be a key part of her personality. In the end he was hoping for a hidden source of empathy and wondered if he could play on that to escape unharmed from this precarious situation. "From what you told me, you think the two species aren't that far off from each other."

"What are you getting at?"

"Vampires aren't animals; so could you kill one?" Her eyebrows knit together as she pursed her lips, looking all the more like a person at war with herself. The foreign expression on her face made Takuma curious as to what she—for all her bravado and cool demeanor—had a problem with. Was it killing a vampire in general? Or was it just the thought of killing anything with higher brain function? "Could you kill a former human? One who's fallen so far that they're no better than a rabid dog?"

Izanami stayed quiet for a while, seeming to mull over his words as he waited for her answer. After a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, Takuma felt he had his answer, and upon seeing him reach this conclusion Izanami opened her mouth and said quietly, "…You're really reaching here, Mr. Prince."

"I'd rather you not kill me, Izanami."

"I could never kill you, Takuma," she said, shaking her head slowly, sadly as she twitched a smile down at him.

His name took him off guard, and honestly he was a little surprised that she still knew it given how little she had said it since the day they met. More surprising still was the softness of her eyes—looking more like the warm pool of a freshwater spring than the cold marbles he had gotten to know. "…You have a softer heart than you like to pretend, Izanami."

"If I had to I could," she said, her eyes narrowing in a soft, indignant glare.

"But you'd feel bad about it," he countered, unsure if it was Izanami's sudden defensiveness or a hidden pit of bravado that made him banter like this, "and that guilt might consume you."

"Do I seem the type of person to let anything consume me?!" she snarled, disbelief clouding her face as she untwisted her arms from around her abdomen and laid them flat against her sides, hands curled into fists as her glare turned fierce.

Takuma hid the shock brought on by her sudden outburst by looking away from her blazing eyes, totally unprepared for her lack of control over her emotions. The poker face she had kept in place all these weeks had finally fallen, and all he had had to do was question her resolve towards her job. Yet still he had the underlying feeling that there was more to this. For now he'd just ignore it. His eyes lifted from the ground to the white bandage on her arm covering the latest of his transgressions. "You let me feed from you once before," he said quietly. Her angered expression dimmed into a solemn one, and she said nothing to neither confirm nor deny what had happened.

Feeling his courage—or maybe it was pluck?—returning, he continued. "Forgive me for saying, but…I don't think you're not cut out for that line of work, Izanami," he told her honestly—though in his mind he had no doubt that she could do her job as vampire hunter just fine. In the end he just wanted to see if she would snap at him once again or hide behind her stoic nature.

Her reply was not one he was expecting.

"…It's the only line of work that's been present to me my whole life," she told him quietly, honestly, and surprisingly with a hint of sincerity in her voice as she relaxed her body, her shoulders slumping from their usual squares as exhaustion crept onto her face. Vaguely Takuma wondered how long she had been waiting for him to wake up, and how long she had this sense of defeat—of resignation—within herself. "Why don't you tell me why that is, Mr. Prince?" she asked him, her eyes betraying her fatigue—a dull shimmer where once they had been a brightened blaze.

Takuma was suddenly at a loss for words. Despite all their talks, their bouts of quid pro quo, the most he knew about Izanami was that all—excluding her father—were deceased, and now that he knew of her profession he could surmise that the harshness of her upbringing via her less-than-stellar father was in preparation of the day she joined the Hunters Association. Deciding to go for broke he gave his answer in the form of an assumption. "Your father is a hunter," if he was correct she made no confirmation, so instead he continued, "So he must have trained you from when you were very young—"

"Correct, Mr. Prince. My father is a hunter, but he kept the practice quiet to keep us out of the loop," she elaborated, "as for the training it was more for his benefit than for mine." Beyond that she said nothing about her overall childhood, and taking that as a signal not to pry he went on with another assumption and another question.

"Your mother…was killed by a vampire I presume."

"Correct."

"…What was the reason for it? If I may ask."

It took her awhile to answer; all the while a pensive look was on her face as she debated whether or not to tell him the circumstances of her death. "…She was killed because of some revenge."

Takuma's brows furrowed in slight confusion. "What did she do?"

Izanami gave him a bitter smile filled with sadness as she replied, "Nothing." Noting his increased confusion she went on, her arms folding loosely against her stomach—more so just holding herself together. "She was just…someone Dad cared about more than anything…anyone…" For the first time that night Takuma had been stunned into silence by how weak and vulnerable she sounded. Ignoring his silence she finished the question he had yet to ask. "If I understand it, my Father killed someone important to him by mistake and it turned into an issue. It only got worse from there."

Talking for the moment was hard and Izanami's sudden wave of insight of the circumstances of her mother's death didn't help the matter. Takuma didn't know what to say to her. Should he apologize for her lose? Or maybe for the loss of both her parents given the somberness of her tone. He kept his mouth shut as a result of his uncertainty, but his face must have betrayed his empathy towards her as she remarked, "That's a pretty conflicted face there, Mr. Prince. What's the matter?"

"…I'm sorry about your parents, Izanami," he hesitated to say. She turned her head away from him and grimaced before kneeling down and sitting on the dirt, her head propped up on her hands as her sharp elbows dug into cream-colored thighs.

"I don't remember my Mom as much as I would like to," she told him honestly, "and I don't remember my Dad as a caring parent, no matter the reason for the training. He just used me for his own devices and used me to run surveillance. I hate being used as a pawn."

"But you still care about him…at least to an extent." He thought back to the moment he had first met Izanami's father and the way he had stood firm with a gun pointed at his daughter's head while she protected Takuma.

"To an extent," she confirmed, scoffing as she did, as if that much was fundamental in any relationship, even the shallowest one, but as quickly as the expression lit her face, it dripped away to one of self-pity. Most likely towards herself Takuma presumed given the context of what she said next. "But I don't…love him per se. He's just someone that took care of me most of my life." Takuma couldn't tell if he was supposed to show pity or vague understanding given her complex situation, but to Izanami it must have looked that he was confused at very least by this lack of sentiment towards her Father.

"Don't give me that look," she sneered, glaring up at him through the light brown curtain of her bangs, "you know what he's like." For the moment he decided to play devil's advocate. Unfortunately for him he could not get past two words before she interrupted him with a shot at his own home life. "Don't sugarcoat a complicated relationship, Mr. Prince. Remind me the relationship between you and your own parents, or the grandfather you killed by your own hand."

The latter of the examples blindsided him—though given where she had found him, and maybe even the subtle hints of hesitation she had most likely picked up on, it became obvious that she would know. _She hides more than she lets on,_ Takuma thought, his expression sober and blank as he said, "So you know about that."

She smirked, looking very much like the cat that ate the canary as she blindsided him once again. "I was hiding in the tree line when the whole place came crashing down; honestly scared the shit outta me when it did. I didn't even notice you were there until the dust cleared."

"Why were you that close to the mansion?" he asked, more concerned for her safety than he was for the actual reason she was there in the first place—though a small piece of the back of his mind wondered this as well. Why had she—a woman who rarely ventured outside the barrier of her small clearing to hunt and such (or was it because he was there that she rarely left?)—walked so far to appear at the borderline of his Grandfather's home? He sensed the answer before he heard it spill from her lips, yet the surprise remained altogether.

This time there was no knowing smile or mischievous grin, just a blank expression. And for that Takuma feared the worst. "He's the man I was running surveillance on," she said, as easily as if she were talking about the weather. Questions immediately filled his head at this as he unconsciously leaned forward; the ropes around his hands beginning to strain against the tender flesh of his wrists. The two questions that spoke loudest in his mind were: was his Grandfather the one who destroyed her family, and did she know how dangerous he was? Even to Takuma, his own flesh and blood, Asato Ichijou had been cruel; tearing his grandchild's chest open and scrapping out a piece of his heart before he himself had been murdered by the hand of his child's child. Takuma decided after a cursory glance over his benefactor's figure that neither she nor her father knew how strong his grandfather had been, and how lucky he was to have escaped the icy grip of death.

"Izanami, you don't know how lucky you are that he didn't find you." Briefly he wondered why he himself hadn't noticed her presence before then, but chalked it up to the more pressing matter of an impending battle clouding his senses. "You're lucky he didn't kill you, or worse."

"He almost did once," she replied quietly, her voice a bit broken in his ears. Seeing his confusion she elaborated. "It's such a small world…isn't it, Ta~ku~ma~," said man's brow furrowed in confusion at the overly affectionate use of his name given the informal nickname she had used the last several weeks, "Your grandfather…is a very frightening man, who looks and acts every bit like the stereotypical vampires one would find in nineteenth century novels. And despite the blonde hair you look nothing like him—which is possibly a blessing since his normal expression alone could make a small child wet themselves. Of course, that's just the personal opinion of an eleven-year-old."

"Eleven…? But…you said your mother died when you were three."

"I didn't meet him when I was three; I met him by chance when I was eleven when he tried to choke me to death." She said it so bluntly he almost couldn't believe what she'd said, but whatever astonishment that showed on his face she ignored as she stood up from her seat on the ground, patted off the lingering dirt clinging to the seat of her shorts and backs of her legs, and walked back to the book case. For a split second Takuma thought she was going to get the box down again—and for a millisecond he wondered if it would end like it had yesterday—but instead she took from the shelves the picture of her herself as a preadolescent child and walked back her position in front of him, holding the picture up for him to inspect.

"Tell me what you see, Mr. Prince."

Confused, he answered the obvious. "You…as a child…?"

She huffed in agitation and repeated, "Take another hard look, Mr. Prince. Tell me what you see."

"I don't know what you want me to see, Izanami," he said, shaking his head.

Her clear disappointment made him feel like an awful person for wringing this type of emotion out of her, the dewy look of lingering hope in her eyes that he might remember making his heart hurt for an entirely different reason. Her heartbroken voice didn't help in the matter. "You can't even remember who I am? I have to say, that kind of hurts my feelings, Mr. Prince." He bit the inside of his bottom lip before apologizing for his lack of memory of her prior to now. "…It really does hurt my feelings, Takuma," she said in voice that held no disappoint or sadness but still sounded much too soft for the hardened personality he had come to expect from her.

"I'd tell you what you want to hear, but I'd just be lying again."

"And for that I thank you for remembering the promise you made me most recently," she told him, an edge to her voice, like she was losing her patience with each word spoken, "but for this conversation to go any further and make any sense as to why I saved _you_—the grandson of my Father's enemy—you need to recall who I was."

"But I still do—"

She interrupted him before he got the full sentence out with something he had heard only once from his own lips. ""Drink this and those nasty bruises will disappear like rain clouds on a sunny day—you look really cute, so it'd be a shame if they stayed any longer.""

What she said sparked recognition within him, and behind the bright green eyes widened in surprise were images of a little girl with the bitter frown. "Iza-chan…?" His voice was barely above a whisper but the young woman heard nevertheless. A large grin lit her face, pleased that he had finally made the comparison between the child he had once met and the young woman who had taken care of him the past several weeks.

"Finally."


	13. 12: Chapter 12

_~Seven years earlier~_

_For her the day had started off normal. Her father sat on the steps of the little stairs underneath the front door of their house, watching her as she practiced cartwheels in the late autumn sun. Above them the branches of a small oak tree shook in the wind, causing several yellowed leaves to spiral to the ground around her as she landed on her back for the fourteenth time. As far as Izanami could remember, the beginning of her eleventh year was her last normal year by human standards. Additionally, before then the most she knew about the absence of her mother was that she had died in a tragic accident—the likes of which she knew nothing about. Most times she liked to think that her mother had died doing something heroic like in the books she read, but whenever she asked her father she got the same reply: "Get your head out of those damn fairytales."_

_She didn't ask him often after the first time._

"_Izanami, it's getting late; head inside," her father had called before retreating inside with a shake of his head after a shouted reply of "five more minutes!" She knew she was terrible at cartwheels—her figure so long and gangly that they never quite turned out right—but she practiced them anyway. It might have been because of this that made her such an easy target for an attractive stranger._

* * *

_For Takuma the day was anything but normal—excluding of course his nature that caused him to be abnormal in the first place. He'd risen several hours earlier than was usual at the behest of his grandfather for an unknown purpose. Soon after a light breakfast he was ushered into the car beside his imposing grandfather and driven through scenery he had seen dozens of times. Takuma wasn't sure what to make of the outing—was it a visit to a friend of his grandfather's or was it another boring meeting with the Council?—he didn't know what to make of it, but neither could he concentrate on the matter as his eyes grew heavy and his head slowly sank to his chest. The silence in the car and the tinted windows helped ease him into sleep, and each bump in the road served to either wake him up or put him to sleep faster. _

_It wasn't until his grandfather spoke and the car had stopped that Takuma pried his tired eyes open, and looked around at the sparse surroundings. "I have some unfinished business here. Wait in the car, Takuma," his grandfather replied in answer to his grandson's question. The young boy pouted as he rubbed his eyes and swung his legs idly against the seat as his grandfather stepped out of the car and left him alone with the driver. _

_Curious as to the business his grandfather had in such a desolate place, Takuma looked around at the scenery once again, spotting only a handful of houses and an obscene amount of trees in the early evening sun. Turning in his seat to look out the back window, he watched his grandfather look around the small community with disdain before narrowing his vision in one particular direction. Takuma looked to see where the older man was staring and found himself staring as well. The house itself was unimpressive—so small it could be considered a hovel and painted a ghastly shade of yellow—no, what caught the young boy's attention was the girl tumbling about in the unkempt front yard._

_Takuma couldn't begin to understand why his grandfather was interested in the girl—her limbs were thin and her body tall and awkward though she couldn't have been much older than twelve. Her hair was short and messy, intertwined with dead leaves and twigs, and her face had a sort of pinched, determined look as she raised her hands above her head and slowly twisted her body sideways. At first glance there shouldn't be anything about this human girl that would interest his grandfather. She—_

She's really bad at cartwheels,_ Takuma had mused as he watched her flop onto the ground barely half a second after performing a perfect handstand. The young boy giggled as he watched the girl toss her arms and legs up into the air in agitation, throwing fallen leaves up with them and causing more to scatter as she let her limbs fall back to the ground._

* * *

_Izanami wasn't aware of her audience until her seventeenth failure had left her in a state of sourness—though she had in fact taken note of the shiny black car that had passed by several moments earlier, remarking that it must have cost more than both her father's car and their house combined. As to its occupants, she was unaware of the fact that one had exited the vehicle and was currently appraising her across the street. Only when the occupant stood at the edge of her property did she turn her blue-green eyes away from the murky orange sky. The man she saw was many times older than herself, this she saw in the pale blond beard and the light lines around his icy blue eyes. His overall demeanor felt to her like a patient wolf assessing its prey._

"_You are the daughter of Yosuno Kusoichi." It might have been a question if the man hadn't said it so matter-of-factly, leaving Izanami to nod her head in agreement as she sat up and eyed the man wearily. The man ignored her when she asked if he had some business with her father and instead commanded her to stand up. His voice had the sort of quality that demanded both attention and respect—whether it be well-deserved or not—and garnered hers as she quickly got to her feet, her shoulders squared as she avoided the critical eye of the stranger before her._

_As he appraised her for an unknown reason, she did the same, looking at all but his face as she took in his black pants, gloves and cloak. Chancing a glance upwards she avoided his hard eyes and openly stared at his pierced, pointed ears. Before she could stop herself she mindlessly blurted out another question, one her father most surely would have reprimanded her for._

"_Are you Dracula?"_

_Izanami bit her tongue so hard she tasted blood as the man before her looked down at her sharply. "I am surprised you know such a person," was his reply. "Did you learn from your father?" Izanami wondered why the man would ask such a question—even further how this man knew her father—but nevertheless answered him as quickly as she could._

"_He says vampires are evil so he won't let me read mom's books." She was unable to keep the bitterness out of her tone at having been banned from reading some of her mother's many classic novels. Truthfully the only reason she knew about the myth/legend himself was because she had read some of the books in secret when her father was passed out most nights. If the man had something to say about the statement he didn't voice it, he instead only remarked on something she would never have expected to come out of his mouth._

"_You are very fortunate to have inherited her face."_

_Izanami's mouth went dry as she stared up at the blond man in shock, watching mutely as he turned away from and walked towards the thicket of trees separating her house from the next. He stopped once at the edge beside the small oak tree to glance at her over his black-clothed shoulder—a silent command to follow him—before he disappeared between the darkening branches and bramble. It took Izanami a moment to understand completely what the man had said, and when her brain finally caught up to her a moment after the man disappeared from sight, she nearly twisted an ankle disappearing into the thicket to catch up to him. "Wait! You know my Mom?!"_

* * *

_The moment the girl ran into the woods along with his grandfather Takuma stepped out of the car, ignoring the driver's reiterated plea to wait for his master to return. Takuma barely heard him as he ran across the street and into the trees surrounding the girl's house; low hanging tree branches and unkempt bushes scrapping against his fair skin as he ran to catch up. It was more than curiosity that made Takuma run after the girl and his grandfather, it was the overwhelming feeling of worry for what was about to happen—though he had no idea what._

"_Please! Please mister; tell me what happened to her! Dad won't tell me anything!" Takuma heard in the dimming light as he scrambled to get out of a clinging bush._

"_She died because of a mistake your father made. My dear, you are going to help me rectify it." He heard his grandfather reply in that cold, unassuming tone of his, the one that sent his nerves firing in agitation. He could never tell what his grandfather was about to do when he used such a tone. Takuma ran faster towards the two voices, wondering what his grandfather was going to do as he listened to the girl's hesitant reply._

"_What…what do you want me to do?" What Takuma heard next froze the blood in his veins and made him stumble in his step._

"_Choose how you want to die. I'll break your neck, or drink you dry; either choice will be painless."_

* * *

_Izanami stared up at the blond man a moment before she took a small step back and started screaming for her father. "D…D-D-DAAAAD!" she yelled, turning on her heel in an effort to go back the way she had come. "DAD! DADD—!" Her pleas for help were cut short when the man reappeared in front of her and grabbed her by the neck, hoisting her into the air and slowly tightening his grip over her windpipe. Izanami struggled within his grasp, scratching blindly at the man's arm and kicking her legs at him, succeeding only in making him tighten his grasp further. Through bleary eyes she looked down at the man who held her at arm's length, silently asking him why he was doing this. Her answer was not one she wanted; more so it made her fear even more what this man was doing to her._

"_Be grateful. You will be reunited with your mother soon." She couldn't tell if he was being sardonic or if he was being truly serious, she only knew that he was completely serious about killing her, but whether he was going to suffocate her or break her neck like he said he would was entirely up to him._

_Izanami's vision began to cloud over, turning dark in time with the setting sun as she struggled to breathe through her gasping mouth. _Dad…anyone…please help me, _she thought, her eyelids fluttering as she fought to remain conscious in the face of inevitable death. _I don't wanna die.

* * *

_When he found them Takuma nearly stopped in place at what he saw. Neither knew he was there—though for the girl that seemed a given since she looked to be concentrating on simply breathing, while his grandfather was completely absorbed in watching her struggle beneath his hand. Only when a twig snapped underneath his foot did his grandfather turn with a look of mild surprise on his stern face, his eyes narrowing into a glare when they fell on the timid form of his young grandson. While Takuma held his warning glower, the girl fell from the man's hand onto the hard ground, coughing and sputtering as she greedily sucked in oxygen, thin hands tenderly clasped around her throat._

"_Grandfather…what are you doing?" Takuma asked him hesitantly, gratefully tearing his eyes away from glaring, glacial blues to terrified, blue-green chips of glass. The man said nothing as he glowered at his perplexed grandson, not sparing the petrified girl behind him a glance as he walked back the way they had come, giving Takuma a single command to return to the car before leaving from sight. Takuma turned his attention fully to the girl still gasping on the ground. "Are you alright?" he asked her worried, taking a few steps towards her before stopping when she scrambled away backwards through dead leaves and broken twigs._

"_His—His eyes turned red! And—and his teeth!" she shouted, visibly distressed as she scooted back further from him on the ground until her back hit a tree. _

_Takuma held up both his palms in an attempt to placate her, giving her a small smile as he took slow deliberate steps towards her. "It's alright. He won't come back, I promise," Takuma told her as if he were talking to a timid rabbit that might flee at the slightest provocation._

"_You're like him, aren't you! You're both monsters!" Takuma flinched at the accusation. Despite knowing that what she had just went through—and what she had seen—would make anyone assume the worst, it still hurt to be seen as such. And he supposed in the long run vampires were to humans what cats were to mice: dangerous._

"_I'm not. I promise I won't hurt you," he tried to explain, hoping to calm the girl down some so he could help her. She stopped wriggling against the tree and stared at him with large, untrusting eyes. Swallowing the lump in his throat, he took another step towards her and knelt down slowly. "My name is Takuma Ichijou," he introduced himself, "What's your name?"_

"…_Izanami…Izanami Kusoichi," she replied, still weary of him as she watched him crawl closer in clothes too nice for his surroundings._

"_Iza-chan, would you let me have a little peek at your neck?"_

"…_You're not going to bite it, are you?"_

_Takuma's smile brightened a little more, a small laugh escaping his throat at the question despite how worried she was about him doing so. "I won't, I promise," he told her, waiting patiently for Izanami to drop her hands from her throat and allow him to poke and prod at the purpling skin. The smile gracing his lips fell from his lips as he looked upon the bruised flesh with sad eyes. He couldn't have imagined what she had done to deserve such a thing from his grandfather—though given the context he had heard he had tried to kill her to punish her father. Well, that wasn't actually accurate. If Asato Ichijou had wanted her dead she would have been way before Takuma even arrived at the scene. No, he wanted her to suffer as long as possible._

"_He said he'd do it quick, but he didn't," Izanami said, half to herself though she looked up into Takuma's eyes, waiting for a reply._

"_Did you…want him to? End it quickly I mean," he asked her, gently pressing his fingertips against the sides of her throat, feeling the rhythmic pulse of her heart as she looked away from him._

"_Since he seemed so keen on killing me, there didn't seem much choice," she replied, leaning against the palms of his hands. "You're hands feel nice and cool," she breathed, eyes drooping as she relished the cool feel of his flesh against her aching neck._

"_I won't let him hurt you again," she heard him say; though the sentiment wasn't enough to make her eyes lift to his. Instead she let the words cloud her mind in pleasant warmth._

"…_Thanks…but I don't think you can help me with my Dad," she replied, reaching a hand up to gently touch the base of her throat. "When he sees this he's going to blow a gasket. And I don't think he'll believe that a vampire did it." She grimaced at the thought of him yelling at her to get her "damn head out of fairytales", looking back at Takuma only when he removed his left hand from her neck and wiped at his mouth._

"_Drink this," he said, holding his hand out in front of her face. She looked down at the appendage quizzically before flinching in repulsion at the long scratch marring the back of his hand, stretching from the webbing between thumb and forefinger to the fragile looking wrist and oozing red blood. She looked back up at him and flinched again at the sight of bright red eyes and very small fangs curving over his bottom lip. A small drop of blood fell from his left fang, and so dropped her stomach as fear took over her mind._

_The fear evaporated as quickly as it had come with the appearance of a bright smile and kind eyes. "Drink this and those nasty bruises will disappear like rain clouds on a sunny day," he told her, his hand still held patiently in front of her mouth. "You look really cute, so it'd be a shame if they stayed any longer." The flattery made her blush and mumble a mild insult at the weirdness of his words, though she felt warm nevertheless as she hesitantly leaned towards his hand and opened her mouth. She had tasted blood a few times before when her baby teeth had started falling out, and Takuma's blood had the same metallic taste to it as her own. The very thought of swallowing blood made her feel sick, and after the first gulp she thought she might vomit. After the second, however, her neck ached less and less, and after another half swallow Takuma's smile brightened and he took his hand away from her stained mouth._

"_Your neck's all better now," he said with a smile, wiping away the blood on Izanami's lips with his thumb before frowning sadly, bright green eyes darting away at something unseen in the near darkness. "I think your father is coming, so I have to go now," he told her, standing up and taking a step away from her. "It was a pleasure to meet you." He turned from her and walked away, back in the direction of the road before Izanami stopped him with a single mention of his name. He turned back, a slightly perplexed expression on his face while Izanami's was flustered._

"_Will I, um…get to see you again?" _

_The calling of Izanami's name grew louder, as did the trumpeting of adult male stomping through the underbrush. Takuma should have worried about being caught, but instead he was all too focused on the awkward girl's anxious look. Takuma opened his mouth to answer her honestly, but in truth it was a half-lie. "I hope not, Iza-chan. It's best for you to stay out of the darkness."_

~Present~

"I wonder if it's a common practice for Ichijou men to lend their blood to that of humans," Izanami mused, speaking half to herself as Takuma looked up at her in alarmed wonder. "If what I've heard through Dad is correct, the Association president was guilty of consumption of vampire blood in return for some sort of favor from your grandfather." Takuma said nothing as she crouched down in front of him and gave him a soulful look. "I could never figure out why he waited so long to try and kill me. My best guess is that he wanted to lead the old man into a false sense of security to make it hurt worse. Either way, it must have been someone very important to warrant that degree of revenge. Know anything about it?"

Takuma shook his head. "He never told me anything. He only reprimanded me for taking so long to return." Izanami's lip quirked up in a hint of a smile before it flattened back into a mirthful line.

"You're grandfather was quite the class act; never expected he'd give me a choice on how I wanted to die."

"You're lucky, he tried to rip out my heart," Takuma couldn't help but be a little bit bitter as he spoke about his own attempted-murder experience. He didn't know why he sounded so, he always knew his grandfather to be cold, regardless of blood-relation.

"I know, I saw. Quite the mess he made of it too, you're lucky yourself that you're still breathing."

Izanami's words caught his attention in more than one way. For one, he now knew how severe his injury had been. And for another, he now wondered how Izanami had managed to save him if he was that close to death. "…How did you save me, if I may ask?"

Izanami went silent, averting her eyes from his as she glared hard at the ground. Below her bowed head he saw her fingers grip her knees tightly and her lip sneer at some unknown thought. "…We'll save that for another day, Mr. Prince. Right now I'd like to focus on us," she forced out through gritted teeth. Takuma's brows knit together in confusion and curiosity. Would saving him not qualify as only them? Or was there a third party present that Izanami had yet to introduce. He doubted very much that Izanami's father would try and save his life if the cold reception he had received, and Takuma's own blood ties had anything to say about it. So who was there left that Izanami knew?

"Izanami, who was it that healed me?" he asked, curious about the third party involved.

Izanami looked to be conflicted about the information he wanted, but the words that ran from her mouth proved her to be defensive about her own involvement in his healing. "I was; you know that."

Reiterating his words, he said again, "I appreciate what you've down for me Izanami, but my major injury…it should have been fatal and beyond your limited expertise. Who was it that fixed it?" Resentment clouded her features as she glared at a hidden corner of the room.

"What's it matter? You're healed, so who cares?" Pursing his lips at her response he begged her one more time to tell him the identity of the third party, disregarding the fact that she clearly did not want to talk about them. "Like I said, it doesn't matter. You're going to meet them soon anyway, so let's leave it in the future."

His curiosity hit its peak at the newest information, and he asked one more time, "Why won't you tell me, Izanami?"

Blue-green eyes shifted up to his slowly, dead hatred filling the entirety of her expression "Because I hate them more than you can possibly fathom, Mr. Prince." She let her words hang in the air between them as he silently stared at her. Dropping her eyes from his she stood up, crossing her arms low across her belly, and shifting her expression effortlessly from cold indifference to tired boredom. "I think we've gotten enough out in the open for now. I'll see you in the morning, Takuma."

Curiosity gave way to alarm as he watched her cover a yawn, and turn away towards the stairs. "Aren't you going to let me go?" he asked her, straining against his bonds as he tried to catch her attention. He wouldn't take her blood again—he'd promised so, hadn't he?—and she'd said so often that he wasn't a threat to her if his current predicament said anything. She turned back towards him, a hint of a smile playing on her lips as she walked back over and said in a slightly playful tone,

"I don't know~ how do I know you won't bite me again?" Even as she said this she knelt down behind him, and picked at the tight knots tying his wrists together. Below the coarse rope she saw that his pale skin was rubbed red, and a step away from breaking. She couldn't tell whether or not his flesh was really that malleable, the rope too coarse, or if he had been actively working at untying himself. Whether or not he got the ropes off his hands didn't matter, however, since she had tied the middle of his arms to the chair back as well.

"I promise I won't, Izanami," he said, though he was fairly sure that he had said as much multiple times tonight.

"Still, a little punishment never did anybody wrong." She let the thin ropes drop to the ground, rubbing a thumb over the raw flesh, and letting go immediately when he quietly hissed. "I'll untie the rest of you in the morning."

"Technically it is morning," he tried to reason with her, tilting his head back to look at her, and causing light blond bangs to fall in his line of vision.

"Pfft~ nice try," she said humorously, brushing the soft hair out of his eyes, and letting her fingertips linger a bit longer than necessary. Her eyes softened as she looked at Takuma's bright green eyes, saddening a bit when she dropped her gaze down to the rope still binding him to the chair. "You don't hate me for doing this, do you? Knocking you out…tying you up…" She trailed off, unsure where to go from there. Takuma filled in the blanks for her with a confirmation of how he truly felt.

"You don't have to worry this, Izanami. I deserved it."

"It's only for the night; don't be such a martyr." She gave him a smirk as she ruffled his blond hair, walking away once again towards the stairs, fully intending to sleep until noon. However, one last thought wormed its way up to the forefront of her mind. With her back to him she asked, "The last thing you said to me…all those years ago…were you serious about it?"

"…Only half."

She looked at him one last time before letting his answer get the better of her, and letting him catch a glimpse of a genuine smile before she trotted upstairs and closed the door behind her, a quick farewell thrown over her shoulder as if she were a carefree child. "Good night, Takuma."

As soon as the door shut, Takuma looked around the dark room in silence, reflecting that karma was just in punishment, and thinking how bored he would be for the next several hours. On the floor above him Izanami pressed her back against the basement door, hand on the tarnished doorknob as she thought about the situation—the whole situation—and how the whole ordeal had started, as well as how it would end. Thinking how ironic it was that she had met Takuma both times in difficult circumstances, and would watch him walk away regardless of his wants twice.

_Maybe I'll take her up on that offer after all…but that would just add insult to injury._


	14. 13: Chapter 13

For several hours Takuma drifted in and out of either complete boredom or short naps, while in between he wondered about the second person who had a hand in his healing. Additionally he wondered why Izanami claimed to hate them so much. For that much hatred it had to be personal, but given the lack of social opportunities Izanami had had in the last few years, the idea seemed unlikely.

_Still, it's impossible to hate someone that much unless you know them,_ Takuma mused as his head lolled back for the nth time that night. _She's not that social though, so who could it be?_ More than once Takuma had found that while he knew Izanami quite well, he also knew remarkably little about her at the same time. She had never mentioned having friends before her relocation from the quiet suburbs to the middle of an isolated forest. Neither did she have any living relatives. Briefly he wondered what it must have felt like to be completely alone for three years, and pondered how the young woman hadn't gone completely crazy.

Then again, he was tied to a chair in the basement of house in the middle of the woods, staring at a rack on a wall holding numerous variations of hand-held's and shotguns. If he tacked on the association she had with him, and the semi-affection she had showed him pervious, he'd say the current situation was very _Misery_-esque. _Hopefully she doesn't break my leg and force me to write a book,_ he joked to himself, chuckling softly in the grey darkness. He stopped immediately when above his head he heard a low creaking. Looking up he watched invisible feet pad softly and sluggishly along the ceiling, followed immediately by the metallic click of a door and a shot thud as it hit the adjacent wall.

The door to the basement flung open; mute light flooding around Izanami's gangly figure as she slowly tromped down the stairs. "Takuma, are you awake?" she whispered, her voice thick with sleep and her body bent as she peeked blearily over the railing.

"Yes, I'm awake," Takuma replied back, his voice an octave above her hushed tone.

"Well I'm not, so let's get this over with quickly so I can go back to sleep," she said as she walked down the rest of the steps. While she was no longer whispering her voice betrayed her exhaustion, and as she neared Takuma he noticed the slight hitch in her walk. "Have you thought long and hard about the error of your ways?" she asked him. He was sure she meant it to be playful, but the way it paired with her weary voice made it seem like a serious question. Either way he nodded in agreement, watching her carefully as she took a step closer to his person and extracted a slim switchblade from the pocket of her shorts. For a moment he wondered if the comment she had made several weeks ago about a knife being strapped to her thigh was actually true, as well as why she had such a thing on her in the first place. When she made to cut the rope strapping his left arm to the chair, he finally voiced his concern.

"Iz-Izanami, go get some more rest. You don't have to do this right now," he said quickly, watching with worry as her body jumped at the subtle demand—though he had spoken softly in order to avoid this reaction. She narrowed her eyes at him a glare—either that or she couldn't see him clearly in the near darkness—and replied back, almost defensively,

"I'm awake enough not to cut you by accident, Mr. Prince."

"I…I know, but—"

"Hold still," she commanded, falling to her knees beside him with a heavy thump. Takuma watched her, concerned, as she wedged her fingers in between his arm and the rope binding him, and inserted the blade. Silently she sawed away at the coarse rope, her eyes blinking rapidly in what seemed an effort to keep away sleep. Takuma's concern simmered down as he watched her work, noting in his mind that she had purposefully woken herself up—from an apparently deep sleep—in order to do this. He knew that she didn't want him to hate her for doing this in the first place—and in all honesty he didn't since he felt that this was the least amount of punishment he could receive for taking her blood without permission—but it was extensive, and a bit irresponsible, to do this half-asleep.

"Izanami…please go back to sleep," he pleaded with her, earning another incessant glare from under the cover of her brown bangs.

"That chair is uncomfortable," she told him, removing the knife from the rope as she sat back on her heels, "and you'd rather be tied to it so I can sleep for a few more hours."

"Yes, I would."

"You're either insane or you're a martyr," she replied deadpan.

Takuma shook his head in disagreement, his brows drawing down in a pleading gesture. "I just don't want you sacrificing your health for mine." She gave him a wry smile before dropping her eyes and snickering to herself. He was curious about her sudden change in temper, but before he could ask her why she asked him a question.

"You remember when you went for a walk and got lost in the woods?" she asked, a twitch of a smile evident on her lips while in her blue-green eyes he saw dark humor.

Suspicious of her he replied, "Yes, you fired off some gun shots and helped me get back."

"Your eyes were bright red when you got back," she said, somewhat distracted as she folded her knife back up and stowed it away in her shorts, "and you drugged me soon after for a blood fix. Why do you think that is?"

"I…I was hungry; I'm sorry."

The wry smile fell from her face as she balanced herself on her knees, her overall expression serious as she said, "If you were hungry enough you would have attacked me, but prior to that you were assumedly trying to get back here."

"I—I was, but…you fired the gun and I…I found out which way to go." Takuma wasn't sure why he was hesitating so much over something he was sure had happened. He went over the details of that night and morning in his mind to make sure; narrowing on every feeling and sense he could remember.

And found that what he remembered was fuzzy at best, and tinged with adrenaline and hunger.

Izanami sighed softly after noticing his frustration, seemingly sympathetic to the reason. "Did you figure it out before or after I fired the gun?" she asked as she slipped from her knees onto her rear, leaning back on her hands as she waited—skeptically—for his answer.

"Be…After."

"Are you sure?"

"…Maybe…before…?" he replied, still unsure of his answer, and unsure why he felt better about this answer than the one he gave prior. Izanami's expression softened as she watched the confusion and frustration flicker across his face.

"How would you know which way to go before the gun shots?" Takuma thought she was being whole-heartedly sincere in her query, but the soft, underlying tone of pressure led him into believing otherwise. And he was right when after a mere moment she asked, in a stronger, more coercive way, "Why would you be so desperate to drug me if you didn't have a trigger?"

Takuma stared at the young woman for a long time, his jaw ticking several times before he found the right set of words to say to her. "What…what did you do, Izanami?" Takuma's incredulous stare widened as his mind fought to understand why Izanami was giving him a "cat who ate the canary" sort of grin, a smile so sly and amused he was subtly aware of how much she resembled a sadistic feline.

"I'm surprised you never asked about the bandage on my arm. You're usually so perceptive," she crooned, her head tilting sleepily as she shifted the weight on her hands to rub at her eyes with the aforementioned limb. "You should have noticed it when you were drinking from it; I don't know how you didn't." Takuma's eyes narrowed on the pale pink line on the width of her forearm before she dropped the limb into her lap, wondering himself how he could have easily overlooked such a thing.

_I thought it was an accident—the rest of her body's covered in them. _"You…you did that on purpose…?" His voice was barely above a whisper as he looked at her in mixed horror and anger: horror at what she had done, and anger at himself for missing something so obvious. Izanami's arms and legs were marred with nicks and cuts, but none were as fine and clean as the line on her forearm.

"So you noticed, but you never asked. How very uncharacteristically rude of you, Mr. Prince," she replied playfully, her amusement mellowing out until it was but a shadow of a flicker in the light of building anger and desperation that now took over Takuma's usually light, soft features. Izanami's breath virtually stopped when he suddenly exclaimed,

"Stop evading the question! Why did you cut yourself?!"

Izanami caught herself before her silence turned into hesitation, and replied in the same airy tone as before, "Well it's not like I wanted to, but it didn't seem like you'd be coming back any time soon and I didn't think you'd have been able to find your way back anyway."

"You shouldn't have done that!" Takuma exclaimed again, anxiety and worry clouding his face, "You could have—"

"I could have what?" Izanami interrupted, annoyance taking over her will to keep the conversation civil and light. She pushed off her hand, and pulled her legs into a cross-legged position, regarding him seriously as she sneered at him and said pointedly "I could have been attacked by a blood-thirsty vampire? Gotten an infection? Sure I could have fired off a few more rounds, but the sound could have reverberated and caused more problems." She shook her head as if she couldn't believe the direction they had gone, looking away from him a moment to cool her head.

_I'd have stayed in bed if I knew this would happen,_ Izanami thought sourly as she turned her head back to look at him. "You worry too much, Mr., Pr..." she trailed off in surprise as she took in the disapproving and angered expression on Takuma's face as he looked down at her. "I tie you to a chair…" she started slowly, quietly, "and you're mad at me about _this_?" she asked disbelievingly, unused to what Takuma was presenting her. As well as to the shame welling up inside her.

She evaded his gaze, unsure of what to say to him as she tried to erase the foreign feeling. Rather than talk, she crawled closer to him and rested her back against his leg, her head on his thigh as she stared at the wall. Takuma's expression softened before he followed suit; deciding that arguing with her now wouldn't change what happened days ago.

"…I disinfected it every day if that makes you feel better," Izanami spoke up after a long moment of silence, her voice lower than before and better evidence to Takuma that she was still tired.

"I just want you to be safe, Izanami," he said, trying to convey to her—since she could not see (or rather that her eyes were focused elsewhere)—that he cared about her wellbeing, much like how he knew she cared about his.

"…You're not like most people—human or vampire—Takuma," she replied, shifting her head to look up at him. To Takuma, her eyes seemed somehow vacant—_Probably because she's tired,_ he thought—but at the same time they looked…sad. "You're really kind; ya know that, right?" Takuma nodded his head, wondering what Izanami was getting at. "People'll take advantage of that if you're not careful." Izanami shifted her body so the side of her head now rested comfortably against his leg, her cheek pressed flush against his clothed thigh, and her legs curled up beneath her as they shared another moment of semi-comfortable silence.

"You didn't tell me that you're unable to turn humans into vampires," Izanami spoke up again, this time genuinely confusing him. Takuma looked down at her to try and guess to what she was referring, and tried very little to suppress a smile when he found her eyes closed, her face relaxed.

"What are you talking about?" he asked, wondering if she was referring to the few times he had bitten her.

"When I drank your blood after you're psychotic grandfather tried to kill me; you didn't tell me it wouldn't turn me," she clarified bitterly, her somewhat-serene face crumpling into a grimace.

"I didn't think it was information worth sharing." Izanami pried open one eye and glowered at him, her mouth still twisted into a grimace.

""Worth sharing". I spent a week waiting for my fangs to grow, and trying to avoid mirrors and windows," she replied bitterly, "When my Dad threw me outside to get some exercise, I screamed bloody murder until I figured out I wasn't dying." With Izanami watching him, Takuma had to suppress whatever amusement he felt, but trying to suppress laughter was like trying to keep Aidou from womanizing—it was going to happen regardless of what anyone (even Kaname) did. "You ass, you think that's funny? 'Cause I sure didn't," Izanami said, both eyes open and a glare on her face as Takuma tried in vain to smother his smile.

"Hah…I-I'm sorry—ha ha!—It-It's just that…" he paused to swallow, his chest heaving as his laughter finally died down, "I didn't know you believed the myths."

Izanami's glare simmered down to an embarrassed pout—an expression, Takuma noted, was the softest and most sincere since his arrival. "Well my Dad destroyed every other belief I had in the paranormal, so why not believe that vampires are allergic to garlic?"

"I suppose you believe in silver stakes as well?" Takuma asked playfully, noticing the drooping of the young woman's eyes and the dull awareness they showed.

Izanami's mouth quirked in a funny half-smile, and snorted out a warbled no before her head bowed forward, and smothered snickers filled the room. Takuma beamed at the sound, mentally labeling this moment as another in which he had made Izanami laugh. Izanami, however, believed that her laughter was caused by the few hours of sleep she had gotten. And as her eyes grew hazier, and her body sluggish, she felt resigned to sleeping where she sat with her head lying against Takuma's leg.

"We moved a lot after it happened," Izanami murmured, her eyes sliding shut again as she shifted herself to lie more comfortably against him. "Really killed my social skills—if I had any to speak of…"

Takuma thought back to his earlier query of who she could have known—and hate so profusely even now—before she had moved into the isolated wilderness. From what he could tell, Izanami had made no long-lasting relationships with anyone in her life—the possible exception being her father and possibly even himself. To reinforce this belief was her constant inquiries about his school life, as well as his friends. If Izanami had had any friends growing up, then she would have mentioned them in passing at least. With her admittance to her alarmingly small social skills, he believed that she had never had any to begin with.

"Izanami…I just think you need practice. I'll help you if you wish. And if it matters…I'll be your friend, Izanami." When Takuma heard no reply, he craned his head to try to see past her bangs, gently moving the leg she was resting against to try and get her attention."...Izanami?" he asked quietly, watching silently as her head lolled to the side, her cheek flush against his thigh, her bangs fallen away from closed eyes.

_Maybe I should have let her untie me,_ Takuma thought, fidgeting in his seat as he strained against the partially cut rope still binding his arm to the chair. It held stead-fast, and made no hint that it would break anytime soon, and so Takuma resigned himself to waiting for Izanami to wake up. In the back of his mind, he knew that with his power, he could easily—never mind his injury—disintegrate the rope, or even the chair he was tied to. Doing the latter would disturb Izanami however, and while doing the former would allow him to take her upstairs and put her to bed, he couldn't. He couldn't for the very simple and selfish reason that he didn't want to.

Izanami was—to him—like a wounded animal, in the way that she seemed to be suspicious and wary, overly aggressive, and above all: hurt. And so, for her to sleep so easily, and casually beside him—even using him to rest her head—gave him a light happiness that he had gotten so close to her. That she trusted him. It didn't even take much to disregard the idea that she may have only slept beside him easily because she was too tired to physically move up the stairs. Smiling softly down at her, Takuma lifted his hand, and swept Izanami's bangs away from her forehead before cupping her cheek in his palm, and stroking the upper curve with his thumb. Remarking how sweet she looked in her sleep as opposed to her venomous front.

* * *

While she slept, Izanami saw nothing. And then she had a dream. She didn't dream of impossible things, of nightmarish terror, or even things that made no sense in any part of the world. She dreamt of a memory, of a bargain, of her first meeting with one of the beings the vampires and the Association called "Pure-Bloods".

_It been just as her father had described to her: a feeling of overwhelming superiority and power. Nevertheless, no matter how her limbs tingled with the instinct to run, and how much her heart thundered in her ears, she would not turn her back on the ethereal being clad in fine clothing befitting of the angel she appeared to be. Izanami lied to herself that the reason for this was that she didn't want to leave the boy who had saved her when she was a child, but the truth of the matter was…she couldn't move her feet, not even as she stood up from where she had been crouching next to Takuma, checking his pulse, and wondering what to do about his injury._

"…_Who are you?" Izanami snidely spat out, the slight tremor in her voice making her bite her tongue in anger. The woman ignored her as she stepped closer, her movements as smooth as spring water, blond, gossamer hair virtually floating behind her._

"_I rushed here to stop Kaname," the woman said, more to herself the unconscious young man than to Izanami, "but I helped in an unexpected way." The blond woman crouched down beside him, a small smirk on her lips as she stated, "If I hadn't stepped in, you'd have lost your life as well." Izanami narrowed her eyes at this, unaware of what entirely went on during the skirmish between the two Ichijo men. The only thing she was certain of was that Takuma had sustained serious injury, and that herself had witnessed the ashes that had once been Ichio Ichijo float away on the wind. Whether or not the strange woman was listening, Izanami broke her silence with a quick remark—only to be silenced with one from the woman. "He's dying you know."_

_Izanami's jaw ticked in irritation before she bit out a reply, "So then what do you suggest I do?" In all honesty, Izanami was not expecting the woman to glance back at her, a sly smirk on her pale pink lips as she straightened up, and turned to face Izanami with a bargain._

"_Let's make an arrangement, shall we?" the woman said, stunning Izanami into curious silence as the woman explained her plan. "We both want Takuma—that much is a given—but only one of us can have him. So I'll make you a deal, I'll save his life, and I'll let you have him for ten days for an exchange of my choosing."_

_Izanami barely let the trade sink in before her shocked features flattened into a snarling grimace. "That seems little unfair, don't you think?" Izanami said between clenched teeth. She wasn't entirely sure what she was made about: the fact that the woman before her was using Takuma's life as a bargaining chip, or that Izanami was actually tempted to take the offer. "I know what you are; you're one of those pompous-ass Pure-Bloods Dad talks about. You're probably going to use him till either he dies or you get bored, and I'm likely to never see him again regardless. Why should I take you up on your offer?" she asked, her hands clenching into tight fists as the smirk slid slowly from the young woman's mouth, replaced instead with an arrogant glare that made Izanami want to submit._

"_Because mountain trash like you doesn't have what he needs to survive. Choose now or he dies, Hunter."_

_Izanami went silent, her eyes narrowing even as they dropped from the deep blue of the vampire royal. True enough, Takuma didn't have time to wait on her decision, but considering the circumstances, it was best to think these things through. "…I owe him everything, so I'll take your offer. But give me thirty days at least; I've waited seven years to meet him again, and human lives are too short in comparison to yours."_

_A corner of the woman's lip twitched up in a small smile—like she had caught Izanami hook, line, and sinker. "In that case, perhaps we can make another deal when I come to collect him."_

"_Another? What else could you have to offer me? I want for nothing," Izanami shot back, wrapping her arms around her middle as she glanced down anxiously at the unconscious young man._

"_You want more time."_

_Izanami's eyes shot back up to the stranger's, grimacing again as she replied hesitantly, "…I'll agree to the first deal, but let me think about the second." The young woman said nothing beyond giving Izanami another successful smile before she turned away and slowly sank to the ground, running her hands over Takuma's blood-smeared chest; long, pointed nails dragging against the marred hole over his heart._

"_My name is Izanami Kusoichi, for future reference," Izanami piped up, watching curiously as the woman worked, her cream-colored coat blocking every move she made in healing Takuma. After a few minutes of silence the woman replied in turn. _

"_Sara Shirabuki-sama. Remember it well." With that Sara stood up, not even fixing another glance on Izanami before she walked away from her and Takuma. Izanami watched for a moment as the blond left before looking back over at Takuma, reacting with shock at what she found._

"_Hey! What's the big idea?! His chest is still ripped open!" she shouted, dropping to her knees beside him, and pressing her hands to his neck and chest, checking to make she he was still alive._

"_You want thirty days, right? Plenty of time to play nursemaid to someone injured. We'll talk later, Miss Kusoichi," Sara replied, her voice faint as she walked back to where her car sat waiting for her return from the battlefield. Scowling despite the feint heartbeat she found, Izanami unshouldered her small supply pack, routing around inside for her emergency first aid kit to find her needle and thread to stitch up the remaining wound. Behind her, she barely heard Sara Shirabuki say, most likely to herself, though it sounded to Izanami to be as much for her ears as it was for Sara's, "I'm so glad I have a good little soldier in my hands." Izanami was unsure if the Pure-Blood was speaking of Takuma or of herself, but at the moment, she was too concerned with Takuma to care about semantics._

Even so, both inside and outside her dream, Izanami was subtly aware that out of the thirty days Sara Shirabuki had allotted her with Takuma, she had three days left.


End file.
